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