MIAMI BEACH – Hewlett-Packard will open its arms to more VARs who want to sell its OpenView applications, partners were told here at the company’s annual software forum last month.
John Moore, regional director of software sales for HP Canada, said his target for this year is a 25 per cent increase in revenue over 2005.
To reach that level “we need help in our implementation partners,” he told reporters. “We probably need a variety of partners,” he said, including some who only do license sales.
But Moore added that he doesn’t want to see a dramatic expansion of the roughly 10 OpenView partners it has already.
“If I could get five dedicated, well-trained implementation partners across Canada in the next couple of years that would be great,” he said.
Long the poor cousin of Hewlett-Packard’s empire behind its profitable printers, servers, PCs and storage products, the company’s software division began getting dressed up with the arrival in January of Thomas Hogan as its senior vice-president. He had been president and CEO of enterprise content management specialist Vignette.
“We have very aggressive plans to lead this market,” Hogan said in his keynote address.
“We have the brand, the reach and the financial resources,” he said.
Sudden spunk
HP Software, which includes the OpenView line and OpenCall telco products, has shown sudden spunk along with the rest of the company.
In the past year the division has been profitable for the first time (making about US$330 million a quarter), in part justifying new CEO Mark Hurd’s demand that Hogan aggressively grow revenues.
Along with sprightly performance in hardware sales, some analysts think Hewlett Packard Co. will pull in more total revenue this year than rival IBM.
At the conference it announced more additions to the already lengthy OpenView portfolio, which totals some 75 products or modules.
They include DecisionCentre, which can run “what-if” scenarios to help organizations decide how to place IT resources; Application Insight 7.0, for discovering and monitoring applications; and AssetCentre 5.0, which can automate asset management.
All will be available later this year.
