New HP CEO Meg Whitman rocks the house at the 2012 HP Global Partner Event

While I was at Meg’s keynote and thought she made a positive impression, which I disclosed in my real-time tweets from there, it is nice to see I wasn’t alone in thinking that. Below is a guest post by G. Andy Marken, of Marken Communications.

Guest post by Andy Marken

The defining moment in new CEO Meg Whitman's incoming keynote to HP's Global Partner Conference really didn't come in the address itself, but in a question afterwards by a partner, Rick Chernick, CEO of Green Bay-based solution provider Camera Corner/Connecting Point (CCCP), which he prefaced with a reference to Léo Apotheker, the former and generally unlamented CEO who addressed the gathering last year.

"After the event last year, my customers asked me my impressions of the new CEO [Apotheker], and my impressions proved to be correct," Chernick said. "When customers ask what I think of the new CEO, I’m going to say 'She rocks.'" That was followed by large applause.

So why did Whitman rock? Her ability to win over the partner audience was certainly helped by the fact of her not being Apotheker. But she also effectively crafted a simple and supportive message which contained three themes the audience really wanted to hear.

Whitman made a pledge of stability, with no more wild changes of strategy, and with a firm commitment to the channel. She made a commitment to focus, on four core areas where HP can be the best at what it does. And she made a commitment to innovation, backed by a pledge of real dollars for research and development.

"When I came in, I wanted to create stability, to be a steady hand on the tiller for this terrific company," Whitman said to loud applause. She made brief reference to the self-inflicted wounds HP made last year, and pledged that partners could count on HP not to create such challenges in the future.

"I want to get HP out of the headlines for the drama and in for what makes HP great," she said. "With PSG, we came to a very obvious conclusion that we are better together than we are apart and I feel great about that decision."

Whitman emphasized that she gets the importance of the channel to HP, and pledged that partners will be central to the company's strategy going forward.

"I want to re-establish HP's reputation as being a reliable trusted partner you can count on," she pledged. "That’s my commitment to you, to be a trusted partner that you can count on to build your business. I love the channel. I get what you do and I appreciate the importance of what we do together for customers," she said.

Whitman also reaffirmed HP's commitments to its roots and traditional strengths as a hardware infrastructure company.

The core of this company is infrastructure, she said. That is the core of who we are and we should be proud of that, being a hardware infrastructure company.

We are in the software business to solve tough customer problems, not to transform HP into a software company, she said.

Whitman further pledged to focus in on four core areas, which she wants HP to do extraordinarily well to make a big difference for the customer. Each piece of this portfolio fits together.

"Converged infrastructure is a distinctive area of competitive advantage for us, and we do it better than anyone else," she said.

The second area is information optimization.

"Data that is largely unstructured and exploding at an incredible rate presents an opportunity to solve very tough data problems for our customers," she said.

Security, which she described as top of mind for every organization, and cloud are the other two areas.

"Cloud is an enormous trend in this business," Whitman said. "It's something that will be important as the transition from mainframe to client server. We need to be at the forefront of that and we will."

Whitman expanded on the focus theme when asked a question about HP's plans in the automotive sector.

"While there may be opportunities for us in automotive, there are bigger opportunities for us in other industries," she said. "We want to focus on a smaller number of things we can really get behind."

Whitman also pledged a deeper commitment to R&D to ensure HP produces quality products and solutions people will want to buy.

"We will continue to do acquisitions, but we have to do a better job of organic innovation," she said. She added that HP Labs had been underutilized lately, and that she wanted to bring them closer to the business units.

"We will double down on organic innovation and double our R&D spend in every area of this company," she said to strong applause.

Whitman acknowledged that in the end it was all about the products, and said HP had the broadest and most powerful portfolio in the industry -- albeit one focused on that goal of doing a small number of things really well. She reviewed some of their new high-profile announcements like the Spectre business Ultrabook, and the Proliant G8 server, and talked about how their webOS strategy has great potential for partners.

"Contributing the webOS code to the open source community will take 2 or 3 or 4 years to really play out, but the industry needs another operating system." While she lauded Apple, she said that iOS is a closed system and Android may be headed that way with Google's purchase of Motorola Mobility.

Finally, Whitman stressed that HP and their partners have to do a better job of telling customers what they bring to the party. To that end, she said HP is investing in a corporate marketing program that will be consistent across all their business units. This will unfold over the next 3-6 months.

"Marketing without delivering the goods isn't worth anything, but consistency of messaging and saying it over and over and over again is," she said.

HP Executive VPs see company strategy back on track with integrated approach

The damage of "8/18" is in the rear-view mirror and HP is on track with a powerful integrated strategy to transform the entire infrastructure industry. That's the message that five of HP's senior executives reiterated Monday to a large gathering of channel press at HP's 2012 Global Partner Conference.

"We set out an ambitious goal to transform the infrastructure industry from top to bottom," said Dave Donatelli, executive vice president and general manager of Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking for the Enterprise Business at HP. "Since November we have redefined what servers are."

Donatelli also highlighted HP gains in storage and networking. "We turned networking into a two horse race, and 90% of our sales there go through partners," he said. "In storage, our 3PAR acquisition has gone extremely well, and we have had tremendous partner uptake with 3PAR. They can now sell and service it."

All of this has been tied together with cloud, with over 500 customers around the world running fully automated cloud system products, Donatelli added. "Partners are looking to transform their business models, and they look for us to show them with cloud how they can transform their businesses so the cloud becomes an opportunity for them and not something they have to worry about," Donatelli said. "We are very excited about where we are, and you will hear more about the cloud," he said. "We believe we have the most advanced cloud offering and we are going to get more vocal about that." "We've had great market uptake on the infrastructure changes, with over 60% of ESSN revenue now going through partners," he said.

Todd Bradley, the EVP of the Personal Systems Group, emphasized that while HP's disastrous August 18 announcement that they would explore divesting his group had caused enormous confusion, it did not mark any kind of strategic shift, and has resulted in the company's reaffirmation of its commitment to this part of its business. "We have shown a deeper commitment than ever to our hardware business broadly," he said. "Our review showed the strategic opportunity for HP to offer broad infrastructure solutions, which wrap software products like Autonomy and the cloud around that."

Bradley placed more emphasis on looking forward, promising far more stability and a focus on great products, including solutions that encompass hardware and software in the cloud. "Last June we looked very aggressively at how to change our product development model, addressing the trend of consumerization with product roadmap, with products that transcend consumer and commercial segments," Bradley said. "There is much to be introduced here over the next few months."

Stephen DiFranco, senior VP and general manager for the Americas region of PSG, pointed to HP's new 13 inch Ultrabook as embodying this trend of blurring the lines between business and consumer products. "It bridges that consumer commercial gap and can be ordered in multiple different formats," DiFranco said. "Our Ultrabooks will be for the business space as well as consumer," Di Franco added. "We don't see that as just consumer."

Bradley said the tablets and the ultra-thin space will see an enormous amount of innovation coming out, particularly once the Windows 8 machines start showing up in the fall.

Bill Veghte, EVP of software , as well as the company's recently appointed Chief Strategy Officer who leads HP's cloud and webOS efforts, noted it had been a great year for HP software, with 33% growth in Q4 alone, but also emphasized that HP partners need to do a better job of integrating HP software into their solutions.

"We started last year on a belief that says the market is fundamentally changing, and so we set out to build an IT performance suite which gives much closer alignment between business users and IT," Vegte said. The HP IT Performance Suite now fills that bill. Still, it and other HP software solutions need to be better leveraged, he said. "Many partners are hardware partners but don't fully leverage the depth of HP as they go to market make sure as they sell hardware they have software that will complement it" he said. "We need to make sure partners become more profitable by leveraging the breadth and depth of the HP portfolio. And he reiterated they need to emphasize the abilities of the IT Performance Suite and what it can do for business of all sizes."

Vyomesh Joshi, EVP of HP's Imaging and Printing Group, also stressed the integration message. He said that while the content explosion means printable content will continue to grow, it is now connecting not just to PCs but to smartphones and tablets and is increasingly digital. "We believe managed print services is the key opportunity relating to the channel," and that recently acquired Printelligent will bring tremendous value to channel partners who integrate it into solutions, Joshi said. "If you are selling print hardware, you want to be selling hardware and supplies, and if you are selling hardware and supplies, you want to be selling services,and if you are selling hardware and supplies and services, you want to be selling solutions" Joshi said. "Go up and down the stack"

HP announces new software incents
At its Global Partner Conference on Wednesday, HP announced a series of new incentives designed to assist and encourage partners to sell more software and related services, including a new promo to encourage HP converged infrastructure partners to partner with HP software partners.

While HP is strongly affirming that it is a hardware infrastructure company and not a software company, it also sees its software as critical to its solution sets, and as a strong opportunity more of its hardware partners need to leverage.

"Software licensing by ESSN partners grew twice as fast as the overall licensing business in 2011," said Bill Veghte, HP's EVP of software, and its recently appointed Chief Strategy Officer. "That's an opportunity for you, because the whole is greater than the sum of its parts."

To that end, Hayley Tabor, newly appointed VP of worldwide partnerships and field excellence at HP, announced HP would make significant investments in FY 2012 to assist partners to sell more software and the services around it in attached and delivering solutions. "We will take our best practices in HP software and leverage those to external partnerships," she said. That will include taking HP's onboarding process for HP's new hires to their internal software sales teams, which walk them through the process of developing new hire productivity, and making it available to partners. "Tools used internally in HP software are also being made available to partners in a programmatic way," Tabor said. All cloud curriculum is also now being made available to partners so they can train their external teams, and 18 certifications will be made available in the next 90 days, she added. "This is all about investments, sharing tools, sharing assets," she said. Tabor also counseled software partners to make use of HP's newly announced HP Interchange, a social media tool to facilitate partner collaboration. "It's a way to connect all of you to drive solutions to our customers," she said. "You asked us to do that. It will allow you to expand your opportunities to bring HP's converged infrastructure partners together with software partners."

Finally to encourage such collaboration, HP announced a special promo targeted at the hardware partners.

"It's a converged infrastructure partner promotion which allocates more than five million to accelerate growth with converged infrastructure partners over the next six months," Tabor said.

"As a converged infrastructure partner, if you bring in an opportunity and partner with an HP software partner, HP will provide a 10% bonus on the opportunity," Tabor said. Partners get a 5% rebate of license sale of any net new software lead that closes. And HP Software will set aside an additional 5% in an investment fund for converged infrastructure partners to invest in HP software, for use in marketing or training.

The latter half of Tabors presentation in the keynote was plagued by a fire alarm in the hotel, which allowed Bill Veghte to get in a good one-liner.

"This promotion is so amazing, the competitors pulled the fire alarm to disrupt," he said.

Andy Marken is President of Marken Communications, and has decades of experience in technology PR and communications.

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