SCC director welcomes vendor break-up craze

Andy Wright welcomes HP and Symantec splits, saying the growth ambitions of many of his vendors has made them hard to deal with

HP and Symantec's decision to split in two has been welcomed by SCC commercial director Andy Wright, who said the increasingly sprawling empires of many of his vendors have made them hard to deal with.

Talking to CRN, Wright said the break-up of the two giant vendors next year would leave each of them with two more focused and agile businesses.

"It's a feature today with many of the [vendor] partners we work with that they've grown outside their core competencies," Wright said.

"And actually, it becomes quite a confusing landscape to engage with. Often the demands on some of my guys in partner management to understand multiple technology disciplines to engage with a supplier can be quite testing."

HP is set to split into two $57bn (£35.5bn) stock market-listed companies next year, one focused on PCs and printers and the other on enterprise solutions and services. Symantec, meanwhile, plans to divide into a $4.2bn security business and $2.5bn information management business in December 2015.

But the penchant for break-ups and spin-offs doesn't stop there, with Cisco this week confirming it is selling its stake in VCE and IBM announcing it is offloading its chip arm.

Wright said: "We think there will be more changes in the marketplace to come and more splits or divesting of bits of business. There are all sorts of different things starting to machinate and that's got to happen because the market is changing and cloud is having an impact on some of those traditional players."

Wright said Symantec's corporate schism "felt like the right thing to do" and also backed the logic of HP's break-up.

"When you look at HP, they operate as two fairly separate businesses today with some common threads and supply chains," he said. "They are a year away from separation so we haven't had a massive amount of detail from them but again I see two more focused businesses with a bit more agility and a different execution model. The PC business – even though it's got a corporate business – is a consumer business and its execution even in the business market is consumer-oriented. It makes sense to us."