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All change at the top of HP's enterprise biz

Same strategy, but can the newbies make it work?

A change at the top of HP’s enterprise distie team across both European and UK ops may well help solve the disconnect that occurred when a regionally drafted strategy was executed locally.

At least that's the hope of some distributors, who want to see the strategic priorities of the business unit heads at country level match those of the execs setting goals across EMEA.

HP has replaced Michael Berhardt, the head of Enterprise Group distribution EMEA with Simon Ewington, previously owner of the same role but for the firm’s printing and personal systems business.

Closer to home, Jonas Pearson — who was running EG distribution in Blighty — is heading to an unspecified role in PPS, and is succeeded by Ian Anderson, who in a past life ran the company's storage division.

“Maybe by changing the people the plans can be more co-ordinated,” said a distributor source, “[as] we’d agree sales programmes with [HP] Europe and find that is not what the local teams wanted to drive”.

The country level EG channel teams report to Gilles Thiebault, veep for indirect, SMB and service provider sales for EG EMEA, not their respective in country leaders. Anderson will report to Ewington on the distribution front. So in this respect there is no change in the model, simply a change in personnel, albeit a potentially vital alteration.

A second source told us HP was “administering distribution” but expects the management refresh to get the company on the front foot again.

Distribution seems to be going through something of a renaissance with more vendors wanting to employ them to extend their reach, including EMC and Dell. ®

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