HP Reaches Out To Midmarket With Financial Incentives

"The small and midsize customer segment is very important to HP," said Kathy Chou, vice president of worldwide SMB strategy and commercial sales for HP, during a World Premiere session Monday at Everything Channel's Midsize Enterprise Summit in Los Angeles, an event that brought together nearly 300 midmarket CIOs. Everything Channel is the parent company of Channelweb.com.

As midsize customers grapple to balance business pain points such as declining revenue, restricted cash flow and hard-to-find new business with demands on IT such as the need to streamline processes, expand data security and solidify business continuity, HP is looking for ways to help midsize CIOs meet those challenges, Chou said.

Chou pointed to new financial offerings and incentives designed to help customers in tough economic times. First, HP's Economic Recovery Lease provides a 36-month low-rate lease that includes a 10 percent end-of-term purchase option. HP also offers a zero-percent 36-month lease with a fair market value end-of-term purchase option, she said.

In addition, HP is offering HP Access cards, which give customers a bevy of rebates and discounts on HP technology, including up to $1,000 in software and services offers and up to $2,000 in server and storage offers, Chou said.

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Chou said CIOs could work with the vendor's VAR and integrator partners to take advantage of the financial offerings.

HP also has several technology solutions in its portfolio aimed at helping CIOs clamp down on costs, including HP's Business Risk Mitigation, Branch Office Consolidation and Insight Remote Support offerings, said Duncan Campbell, vice president of HP's Technology Solutions Group.

Campbell also touted the vendor's virtualization offerings. "Virtualization is fantastic. You can get cost savings up front. But some of the challenges are how do you apply it and how do you optimize it," he said. "It's not so much about virtualizing individual pieces. It's about how you virtualize the entire infrastructure," he added.

Christopher Perusse, director of IT at Bessemer Venture Partners, a venture capital firm based in Larchmont, N.Y., said his company has virtualized 85 percent of its HP servers. "What it really does for us is simplify things," Perusse said, noting that problems such as server operating system crashes have been dramatically reduced. "It allows us, with our small IT staff, to focus our resources on mission-critical projects."