HP Premier Partners Get More MPS Accounts

HP has made available to its U.S. print premier channel partners thousands of managed-print services (MPS) specialty accounts that previously were handled by the company.

Under the expansion, a larger segment of MPS accounts will be served with one dedicated HP lead account manager who spearheads print and copy solutions and one channel lead for MPS. The HP lead account manager is committed to each customer and the channel collaborates with the HP account executive to serve the customer together.

HP’s Grad Rosenbaum

Grad Rosenbaum, HP‘s vice president and general manager of solutions in the Americas, tells Channel Partners that the move is to support the “very fast growing premier channel we have going now and provide additional support to them.”

“We’re literally shifting resources internally from direct resources to hiring aggressively more of our channel resources at HP so that we can more proactively and more deliberately support and enable their growth,” he said. “And we’re doing that with hiring around channel reps … and also all of the other supporting resources in order to continue to help these channel partners grow with HP. So it can be everything from our pricing desk to security specialists, to workflow specialists, to technical consultants [and so on].”

The program is a next step in the company’s office printing strategy to grow contractual and channel concurrently this year, while earning incremental market share for both the A3 and A4 product lines.

“We’ve had some really good acceleration with our premier program, but it is really shooting up now because of the A3 platforms that we announced a little over a year ago,” Rosenbaum said. “As we got further engaged and down the track with a number of these premier partners in terms of them leading out with our newly announced platforms, we found very big growth not only in those new A3 platforms, but also this channel accelerating what they’re doing with us in A4 printers and also in supplies.”

HP will begin focusing on a concentrated, larger subset of accounts in both the commercial and public-sector markets. HP MPS specialists will engage only the largest customers in HP’s specialty MPS segment and continue collaborating with the channel in this set of accounts, according to the company.

“We’re doing some account mapping sessions with our top partners in each major market to identify where are the opportunities they would like to go after next with HP and how can HP provide the technical resources, the sales resources, whatever they need, in order for them to be successful in those accounts,” Rosenbaum said. “By shifting more of our resources to supporting the channel, we’re able to bring on selectively more channel partners because we have more HP employees to engage with them.”

“This is great news and provides an excellent opportunity to deepen our relationship with HP,” said Richard Cucco, managing partner for Imagetec. “What I have experienced in the last nine months while being a premier dealer is that HP is laser-focused on client satisfaction and expanding [its] relationships with clients. This change will reinforce that most clients want to do business with their local service provider and now HP has set up service providers that they feel confident will provide the same or greater level of service as HP to the local market.”