HP getting 'hip and new age' with social focus in new-look Partner First

Partner First gets a facelift to mark anniversary of the HP split

HP is looking to become "hip and new age" with a sharper focus on social media, which will be one strand of its new-look Partner First programme.

From 1 November, 12 months since HP split in two, Partner First will have a number of new elements, which have been worked on over the last year.

Its lowest-tier Business Partner level will be scrapped, with partners on that tier being upgraded to Silver, or being "empowered" to work closely with disties. HP said this will make it more efficient.

"We felt, talking to partners and distributors, that we ended up doing the same work twice and not reaching partners as efficiently as we would have liked to," said HP's global channel chief Thomas Jensen. "It's a division of who is the primary engager and where, so we can spend more time with partners."

A renewed focus on social media is another element of the Partner First facelift. The Social Media Centre, which will be available in the UK this month, will give partners access to a wide range of content that is easily shareable to social media sites. The idea is that partners gain a stronger presence online, which will help generate leads.

A number of HP execs are active on Twitter - Jensen (pictured) is a regular tweeter and has almost 400 followers. But HP's CEO Dion Weisler does not appear to be active. An account bearing his name and picture exists, but it does not hold the blue tick symbol to show it has been verified, and no tweets have been sent from the account. The account follows just one other - HP.

Nick Lazaridis, HP's EMEA president, told CRN that the new social focus will help partners a lot.

"It's about making life easier for partners," he said. "Most of those partners have been in business for 30-something years so they're not of that millennial generation, but they are part of that wave of getting in touch with millennials and the Facebook generation."

Lazaridis said the move symbolises HP's looking to move with the times and become "a bit more hip".

HP getting 'hip and new age' with social focus in new-look Partner First

Partner First gets a facelift to mark anniversary of the HP split

"We're trying to be a bit more hip and new age with the design of the products and the brand. We're helping launch our partners with us into that social media world."

Earlier on in the HP keynote, CEO Weisler was bullish on the firm's PC business, insisting although the overall market is turbulent, pockets of growth exist - such as commercial mobility and new form factors.

Over the last few years, partners have been urged by vendors to embrace as-a-service models and the cloud, and as a result, many have turned their noses up as traditional "box-shifting" transactional business.

Lazaridis said that some partners are in fact keen to hang on to more traditional models, and said there is still money in this.

"I would say that all partners here, if you rewind eight to ten years ago, they were proud box movers," he said. "And they questioned me and said we want to make sure what we heard today wasn't that you're exiting transactional. I said no. I went back and we talked about the core [business] and half of that is still transactional and will always be that way. There are people who just want to spend and say I own it and don't want to pay monthly or whatever. That bit will remain transactional, but contractual will keep growing. There's growth in contractual, but transactional is not going away. Those partners were scared that we were saying we don't want to do transactional box moving any more. There is a place for it. There are large corporates who just want to buy a box."