Channeling the New HP

The new HP in India is the first entity across Asia to integrate the channel
policies of erstwhile HP and Compaq. In this new channel policy, the new HP’s
Indian entity has integrated the two sets of channel policies including credit
terms, cash discounts, stock price protection and inventory management.

Elaborating on this new channel policy, Prasenjit Sarkar, Commercial Channel
head, HP India, said, "We will stick to HP’s two tier channel program
that measures the ‘sale outs’ (sales from channel partners to end customers)
and the channel partners of a particular partner, unlike Compaq’s channel
program that is based on ‘sale ins’ (sales from vendor/distributor to the
channel partner) only."

It has realigned the incentive programs for all three tiers of its channel
hierarchy–wholesalers, resellers and sales executives. For the horizontal
partner accreditation, now there will be Premier Business Partners, Premier
Partners and Registered Partners across the new HP. For the resellers, it will
have the Final Tier Performance Plus (FTPP) in place. For the sales executives,
it has merged the erstwhile reward schemes of pre-merger HP and Compaq, called
Superstar Loyalty and e-Points, by announcing e-Points across the board.

To facilitate this, the company has invited all Compaq partners to register
themselves under the new HP’s Premier Partner family. "This is being done
for all the product categories, right from printers to servers to commercial
desktops," revealed Sarkar.

Talking about the vertical program category, he said that these programs will
be product specific and all the channel partners of this new entity would be
eligible for the same. Though, some channel programs have been renamed in order
to eliminate ambiguity.

Talking about the tactical programs, Sarkar said that now the new entity
would be able to offer better programs to its channel partners as products
offers can now be bundled resulting in a win-win situation for channel partners
across the board. With this development, the new HP’s four national
distributors–Tech Pacific, Redington, Ingram Micro and Iris Computers–now have
a standard model of credit, credit terms, and cash discounts, informed Sarkar.
The company has also put in place, regular auditing of all channel programs by
an external auditing agency, which wasn’t the case for Compaq. Besides this, a
new CRM function has also been introduced to look after the interests of the
channel partners. HP has also allotted user IDs and passwords to Compaq channel
partners to monitor their performance
online, the same way as HP channel partners have been doing so far. Sarkar is
happy about the enthusiasm shown by the new channel community in terms of
acceptance of these new policies and the fact that India has been the first
country to integrate the channel policy.

Shweta Khanna in New Delhi