HP CEO Meg Whitman: I Love the Channel

She has spent more than 1,000 hours in customer and partner meetings since joining HP.

“Our channel partners have literally built Hewlett-Packard. The channel was right there from the early days around the globe. Many of you have been our partners not for years, but for decades.”

Whitman said she will offer an update on HP’s effort to restore growth.

“I know we have had missteps, change at the top of HP and challenges.” She then thanked partners for their support among the missteps.

Whitman reinforced her four-year plan (2012-2015) to turn around HP. She said HP will see solid progress this year.

HP generated $10.6B in cash flow last year. That’s more than Coca Cola, Disney, McDonald’s and Visa produced in their most recent years.

Also, HP has reduced its debt by more than $5 billion.

The merger of HP’s printing and printer businesses has gone really well, she asserted.

Whitman noted that HP has consolidated various sales, marketing and business functions to bring consistency and certainty to the organization.

Mentioning CEO and executive turnover from the past, Whitman turned the page: “We’re here, we’re in place, we have a strategy and we’re executing.”

The big brand effort involves “Make it matter.”

Whitman has met more than 300 channel partners. One of the first meetings — three days into the job — was with CDW, at which time Whitman took out pencil and paper and said: “Tell me everything I need to know.”

She vowed that HP will not take business direct away from partners.

“Innovation is alive and well at HP,” she said, while conceding that HP perhaps needs to do a better job productizing solutions for partners to sell to customers.

Whitman spends 30 percent to 40 percent of her time out in front of customers.

“In networking we’re the disrupters. And by the way we are first to market with SDN. I think we are widely recognized for that.”

Her management philosophy: Right people , right job, right time, right attitude. “We’ve kept our best and brightest channel executives” she asserted without mentioning key executives who have exited in the past year or so.

Whitman said HP is the only company that can scale across devices, hardware, software and services for both corporate and consumer.

“Innovation is alive and well at HP.”

Last year HP was issued more patents than any other company in Silicon Valley.

Veghte spoke a lot about his experience at Microsoft — first with Word and Excel, then Office then the web browser.

Mobility, cloud, social and big data are the four big components of new style IT.

Customers need comprehensive solutions that combine hardware, software and services.

He described a world where HP and partners will advise, transform, manage and maintain customer settings.

HP’s simple premise on personal systems: “You want a consumer experience without compromising enterprise requirements.”

“HP is not Apple. Is not Samsung. Is not Google.” Instead, the company has both enterprise and consumer expertise.

Converged infrastructure business: People are going to consume a lot of storage, bandwidth and compute but in a different way. The goal going forward is managing everything as a pool of resources. With software defined data center, you will be able to apply business logic to it.

Seek vendors that have modern architectures, he added.

Software: “This is one of the best kept secrets at HP.” The strategy involves automation and application lifecycle management; securing the IT border; and powered big data across both structured and unstructured data.

Cloud: It’s going to be a messy, evolving market for at least the next five years — and that opens up opportunities for partners, he asserted.

HP Converged Cloud: HP will strive to deliver choice, confidence and consistency.

HP has two cloud partner program opportunities: (1) Cloud Builder for resellers, distributors and system integrators (2) Cloud Agile for service providers — with 60 partners on board. HP Financial Services will offer the right financial programs and asset management. Plus HP ExpertOne will offer the right training and education, he added.