Oliver Hill (HP)
HP New Zealand country manager Oliver Hill has a lot to be happy about as fears of a COVID-19 hardware hangover appear to recede.
The company, which lost its top spot in a the PC market for a single quarter back in 2020, has since remained the clear market leader.
Supply chains have strengthened and the US$3.3 billion acquisition of collaboration and communication technology vendor Poly in March had HP's channel partners energised, Hill told Reseller News.
"We are back in terms of supply, which means we are on the front foot driving the business rather than managing supply and being logistics specialists," he said. "Now we are back to what we normally do: working with partners grow their business with us."
There are also celebrations to be held in the form of HP New Zealand's annual partner awards, for which entries close on Tuesday. These will return to in-person this year after a delays saw 2021's awards delivered in April.
Hill said while the overall market had come back roughly to pre-pandemic levels from its pandemic-driven highs, but it had also avoided most of the dire predictions being bandied about.
Demand was being driven in part by people now needing more than one device.
"The need for technology is greater than it was," Hill said. "We think the market will remain larger than it was pre-pandemic."
HP was still working through how the Poly brand would be represented, Hill said, but however that played out, from 1 November the entire HP team would be helping to drive the business.
HP and Poly were both highly channel centric vendors, he said, so the question was now how they could come together to make things easier for partners, especially on the services side, with the promise of a single vendor to own any problems across the combined product stacks.
"We don’t want to disrupt their go-to-market," Hill said. "They have a very clear approach. At least for first 12 months we will be leaving them to do what they have always been doing."
On top of all that, HP New Zealand is also implementing a programme called Amplify Impact, centred on climate action, human rights and digital equity.
"The implementation of Amplify Impact is really important to us because we are such a channel centric business," Hill said. "If we really want to deliver amazing sustainability outcomes, which we do, then getting our partners on that journey with us and enabling them at the same time is really important."
As to the state of the market after COVID, Hill said it was "dynamic", with a lot of people asking what's next.
"It is a very interesting market a the moment," he said. "Obviously there is a lot of cost pressure on consumers and that is having an impact but what we are seeing in the enterprise and commercial market is there is no slow-down. It’s actually full steam ahead."
For partners, while there was plenty of opportunity, the biggest challenge was to find the people needed to make stuff happen.
All of that sets things up for a mighty get-together at HP's annual partner awards, which are back to live and in-person.
Tracey Brewer, HP New Zealand's sales manager, commercial, said the event would also retain some of the highlight features that made the last virtual event memorable.
Credit: Supplied In particular, the series quirky, comic videos featuring Hill, other HP team members and HP partners would once again feature.
Brewer told Reseller News most categories would be judged internally by executives and partner business managers while three categories were to be nominated by the channel.
"Partner engagement is really high," Brewer said. "It's a challenging market at the moment but engagement between the team and the community is really strong."
Hill expressed his gratitude to that partner community for their work during the pandemic and also to the HP service team which he credited with much of HP's customer retention success.
