14 April 2008
by Alex Scroxton
HP ProCurve resellers have welcomed a series of enhancements to the firm’s Select Partner Programme introduced last week.
The networking arm of Hewlett-Packard is aggressively chasing down its rivals and in January, incoming UK boss Darryl Brick told MicroScope he would expand its reach through ramping up R&D spend and attacking Cisco’s market dominance. Brick added that he would not be using the business unit as a "weapon" against rivals.
Larry Rach, managing director of ProCurve partner Twin Technology, believed access to the HP ecosystem was key to tempting resellers away from other vendors and said: "We are also not affected by external or grey markets with ProCurve."
"Brick has really added to this side of the business, and it’s clearly smoothing over some historical differences between HP and ProCurve," he added.
The additions made to the Select programme include a sales toolkit incorporating technical, marketing and business support for dealers, as well as preferred access to expertise from ProCurve’s European Network Design Centre.
Rach described the network design element as "enormously" helpful to average resellers. "It can be a real sanity check for our solution designers," he said.
Procurve EMEA Select Partner sales manager, Paul Karadi, believed the enhancements would be a powerful differentiator to the average ProCurve reseller and talked up the importance of allowing a "frictionless sales experience".
"Feedback from resellers showed they’re looking for a vendor that’s easy to deal with. It seems obvious but we forget that resellers must meet the needs of their end-users in order to meet their needs. If ProCurve can help that process it’s a benefit," Karadi said.
Karadi hinted at further refinements and announcements to be made public soon, and while he did not disclose details of ProCurve’s progress towards the targets set by Brick, insisted the unit was meeting its objectives.
