Kudos to HP for its recently launched HP Partner Navigator Programme which I found from a news story on MicroScope. Those of us who have followed the upheavals at HP since the days of Carly Fiorina (ex-CEO, failed Republican nominee for California state governor in 2010 and potential presidential candidate for 2016), might be forgiven for thinking it comes a little late in the day.
It might have been useful, for example, during the short-lived reign of Leo Apothekar when HP announced it was planning to sell off its PC business or spin it off or maybe keep it after all. After Meg Whitman replaced Apothekar, the Partner Navigator wasn’t really needed for the first couple of years. Whitman took the decision to keep the PC business and everything returned to normal.
Until last October, when she revealed plans to split HP into two separate companies: HP Inc for the PC and print business and HP Enterprise for servers, storage, networking, software and services. The changes come into effect from 1 November this year. It might have been useful if the Partner Navigator could help discern how Whitman had arrived at more or less the same decision three years after Apothekar while making it make sense this time.
The Navigator might also have given partners an insight into how Whitman had gone from a fairly clear defence of HP’s position as a single company spanning a wide range of technology areas in August 2013 to an advocate of company break up 14 months later. In August 2013, Whitman told CNBC’s Squawk on the Street that there were no plans to break the company up “at this time” and highlighted its strengths as a single entity.
Self-belief
“I believe firmly that HP has a set of assets that is unique in the big cap technology sector today,” she said. “We are the only company who can go from devices to infrastructure to services and software and this is a huge point of difference as we can bring a series of assets to bear on some of the big shifts in the market.”
A single HP also benefited from scale which she described as “a huge advantage. No one has greater reach and scale than HP does, no one has the ability to bring products to market as fast as we do when we work really well together”. She intimated HP still had time to prove the single approach worked: “Obviously in five years if we haven’t proved that out, maybe there’ll be a different answer but I feel really strongly that this is better together.”
It would be fairly challenging for HP Partner Navigator to map its way around the contours that led to a decision completely overturning that stance 14 months later. Oh wait, it’s not that hard to go around in a circle.
In any case, HP Partner Navigator isn’t about that. It’s about how to get partners to where HP is going on 1 November 2015. In the words of HP, it’s about helping “partners navigate the operational changes needed due to HP’s separation into two legal entities”. It will provide “resources, tools and operational support to help partners ensure readiness and business continuity throughout all operational aspects of the separation”.
Still, I can’t help feeling the convoluted route HP has taken to arrive back where it started shows that it might have made sense for the company to set up a Navigator-style programme back in 2011. Maybe HP Inc and HP Enterprise should consider putting their own Navigator schemes in place.
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