In his first full year as HP (NYSE: HPQ) Canada’s channel chief after swapping positions with veteran Dave Frederickson, Greg Chappell had a busy year building on the strength of HP’s Canadian channel.
Already an HP veteran who had headed HP Canada’s Enterprise Storage and Servers Group, Chappell relished the opportunity to enter a partner-facing role. His goals included investing to ensure SMB partners are better able to leverage the benefits of Partner One, rolling-out the new Preferred and Elite designations, and placing increased emphasis on competencies.
“One key is investing to expend the coverage of our partner community. We’ll invest in more sales people and more specialists to extend our reach,” said Chappell.
It was a year of major new acquisitions and digesting older ones for HP. As rival Dell sought to match HP with the acquisition of Perot Systems, HP continuing its integration of EDS Corp., a 2008 deal which shot HP to the top of the IT services market, right behind IBM Canada Ltd. (NYSE: IBM). HP announced in September it would leave the EDS brand behind and rename its IT services provider business HP Enterprise Services.
And in another major acquisition, in November HP announced it would spent US$2.7 billion to acquire communications networking vendor 3Com.
HP ramped-up its efforts in the area of managed print services by announcing a new business group that will manage printing environments and help companies reduce the printer hardware they need to use.