HP Inc jumps into commercial phone space
Vendor searching for 20 UK 'mobility specialist' resellers to flog new gadget Elite x3
HP Inc is hunting for 20 new mobility specialist partners in the UK to sell the business-focused mobile phone it launched last night at Mobile World Congress.
The HP Elite x3 is a mobile phone which the firm claims "bridges phablet, laptop and desktop use cases from a single computing device". It was designed with business users in mind.
The company claims the commercial space has been neglected when it comes to mobiles, with the BYOD trend meaning vendors tend to focus on making consumer devices, which are then adapted to business users.
"What you largely see right now in the commercial market is a category of BYOD where you have a lot of consumer phones coming [in], and the need for BYOD is forcing more durability in addition to the designs which are being created," said Michael Park, HP Inc's general manager of mobility.
"I think Apple and Samsung and these guys are going to continue to play that scenario where consumer devices come in via the employee and BYOD. But this whole new class of where the workload is going - where applications are moving from PCs to mobile devices - creates an entirely new opportunity above and beyond that.
"The apps can be natively built and leveraged off the infrastructure of what most corporations use at the back end today - that's Windows and Office. So we believe that this solution... creates a new paradigm in the user experience which is fundamentally different and will certainty give CIOs and the IT department more peace of mind."
The product will be available in the UK through HP Inc's existing partner base, as well as 20 new mobility specialists the firm is recruiting through the mobile units of disties Westcoast, Tech Data and Ingram Micro. On top of this, some global telcos will be able to sell the product to their commercial customers, which the firm insisted would not compete with the channel.
"Channel is a big part of our go-to-market on the PC side," Park added. "We're going to flex this solution into the same portfolio we drive with our commercial PCs."
When asked if the push into mobile hardware will cannibalise HP Inc's PC sales, Park said:
"The focus is on enabling the user experience. I think it will cannibalise some PCs, it will cannibalise some BYOD, I think it will cannibalise some of the phone business, for sure. I think it will open up new opportunities.
"I think when you look at the market and... you use trends to predict where the market is going to be, you're only going to create incrementalism. We're looking at the whole picture of where computing is going, knowing that the mega trend is mobility. We know in commercial that the app is going to transition and we think the timing of mobility, Windows 10, data being everywhere - this is a perfect storm of opportunity for us to step in and provide a commercial solution to a need that is really not being met today."