Hurd Calls On HP Partners To Step Up Their Game

Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd called on channel partners Tuesday to muscle up with HP in addressing a larger part of the U.S. market for technology.

"First, I want to say thank you. It is huge for us to have the support of the channel. Five years ago our objective was not to tell you everything you might want to hear, but what we told you, we'd stand behind," Hurd said at the Palo Alto, Calif.-based computing giant's 2010 Americas Partner Conference in Las Vegas.

Hurd spent an hour speaking with partners on Day Two of APC 2010, confiding that for all the success HP and its channel partners have in the U.S. market, they're simply not getting in front of enough potential customers.

"I need your help. We're underrepresented in the U.S.," Hurd said. "Our win rate is too high. Now you don't hear that too often. Because our proposal rate is too low. We have to be able to bid on the whole market."

Hurd said HP may win upwards of 80 percent of its engagements, but that while he'd love to see that number remain so high, he'd prefer that HP and its partners get in front of a lot more U.S. technology buyers. HP is in "single digits in the U.S. in market share," he said, whereas the company is in double digits in the European and Asian markets.

"But market share is not the objective, it's the result," Hurd added. "You don't set out to gain market share, you set out to make great technology. So market share in isolation is not the objective. Growing profitably is the objective."

Hurd said that HP is going all-in on its belief that its Converged Infrastructure Architecture is the right path forward for the evolving data center, despite what he said were the objections of some skeptics.

"We're committed through and through," he said. "It's almost a mandate now to have servers with networking capabilities. And we must have that IP. I'm just suspicious of people who say their IP alone is going to dominate the data center. The world revolves around networking? I would want to look at the P&L of a company that said that and see if, you know, they're a networking company."

Next: Market Changes Coming

He said that the three main hardware pillars of the data center -- servers, storage and networking -- "would continue to behave as silos for some."

"But that's changing. This fundamental market is going to change. That's why it's so important for us to have IP in each technology," Hurd said.

Hurd also promised partners to make working with HP easier, admitting that HP "might be complicated, might be bureaucratic" due to its enormous scale as the world's largest IT company.

"Contrary to popular belief we don't sit around trying to make things harder or more complicated," he said. "But we have to supplement the great work we do with the channel with an operational cadence that makes it easier for channel to do business with us.

"The deeper the channel is invested in us, the better we feel. We need to make it easy for you to invest. We've made it too complicated across silos. There's all this HP-created complexity that we've got to reduce."