Credit: Image supplied by HP
2020 has been a difficult year for businesses across Asia-Pacific, with extreme market volatility and disruption impacting on supply chains, cash flows, and even the ability for employees to work on site. This has had an impact on the CIO and their team too, with many facing the need to rapidly innovate and shift focus to transformation and resiliency exercises.
And yet the indicators are strong for a robust recovery and accelerating investment into IT. IDC recently increased its projections for IT spending in 2021, based on the expected “bounce.” Asia-Pacific, in particular, is in a healthy position, with six of the top ten fastest-growing ecommerce nations coming from Asia-Pacific, and Asia as a whole is on track to account for over 50 per cent of global GDP by 2040.
KPMG predicts that by 2025 80 per cent of revenue growth will come from digital sources. For channel organisations, the appetite for innovation in these digital-first emerging economies will be a significant opportunity.
“Winning in this environment means companies must evolve the customer experience so customers can move seamlessly between this more complex blend of digital and physical channels,” HP Head Channels and Supplies Sales, David Tan, said. “That is where HP Amplify can help.”
HP Amplify is a global channel initiative by the company to consolidate its partner products, tools and trainings into the one platform to provide to partners. It simplifies down the number of “tracks” available to partners to provide them with better flexibility to invest in value-added services and capabilities.
HP Amplify does this across three core performance “pillars”: performance, capabilities and collaboration:
- Performance: Just as the sales model within channel organisations has shifted, so too are partners no longer rewarded exclusively based on goals and volume. Rather, HP Amplify trans and rewards based on a breadth of metrics, including registration volume to average sales value and account retention.
- Capabilities: The HP Amplify program also rewards partners based on their willingness to invest in and skill-up in digital capabilities. HP wants a network of partners skilled in secure data collection, routes to market, services and digital specializations, and is investing in partners to create that network.
- Collaboration: Finally, in recognizing the strength of a combined go-to-market, HP Amplify leverages deep data analytics to drive insights and new strategies to help partners drive innovation.
“Especially in the new business environment, we want to help our partners across Asia-Pacific prepare for a new market dynamic, create more personalized experiences, and become more competitive, relevant, efficient, profitable and uncover new revenue streams,” Tan said.
“It is designed from the ground up to measure and reward partners for a variety of performance indicators –beyond sales revenue, such as investing in and improving digital skills, data sharing, e-commerce and omni-experience customer solutions and services capabilities. These are the capabilities and behaviours that we believe are necessary to make HP and our partners thrive – something we believe no other hardware vendor has offered before in the region.”
While the Amplify program is a global one, and provides partners with the benefits of expertise and insights across all markets, Tan also said that the program was highly localised to meet the needs of each channel network within Asia-Pacific.
“Partners will be able to serve customers more seamlessly through automated inventory updates, product returns and holistic data intelligence. From there, HP will use the data to better guide channel partners allowing them to plan and respond more efficiently,” Tan said. “This is how we will make them leaner and more profitable businesses especially in a competitive Asia-Pacific environment.
“We believe there is real opportunity for innovation in the channel with HP Amplify. So, whether a partner offers managed print services for SMBs in Manila or is an enterprise in the heart of Seoul selling the latest consumer electronics, together, with data flowing both ways, we’ll all be able to better anticipate, personalise and meet our customers’ diverse needs.”
HP has always driven the bulk of its business through its channel partnerships, and as the company has grown, changed, built presences in new markets and expanded its product and services lines, it has collected a lot of complexity within the channel programs. With several hundred regional and country programs across the world, the consequence to that level of complexity was that it hampered the ability for partners to engage with HP efficiently and with innovation as the focus. Now, however, partners have access to automation for inventory updates, product returns and data intelligence to help them run more efficiently, lean, and ultimately focus on the technology.
“This approach will be new to many of our partners, but they can trust us to create a cohesive, secure and transparent framework for managing data – and this is where we leverage on our global network,” Tan said. “Globally we pride ourselves on being compliant with data regulation laws from GDPR in Europe to the California Privacy Act in America and a variety of legislation in Asia. HP Amplify will establish ourselves as leader in the industry for data intelligence to add value and build upon the long-standing bonds between customers, partners and HP.”
