Growing from Strength to Strength

Subhodeep Bhattacharya
Director - HP Networking
HP India

What are the current trends in the Indian networking industry? Is the concept of open standards new?

Basically, in the past most of the networking protocols were designed by specific companies and they were mostly proprietary in nature. This means they work only with their product.   This is a situation where if the customer once buys a product from a vendor they were purposely forced to buy more from the same vendor. But now there is a demand for open standards which is IEEE compliant. Once you have this kind of compliance, everybody follows it as it actually allows one vendor's product to work seamlessly with other vendor's product and the ultimate beneficiary of this activity is the customer as the customer is no longer bound by a particular vendor or a particular brand. In the case of HP, since its inception we have followed the open standard. We are not in favour of handcuffing the customer and forcing the customer into a proprietary technology. The other trend which we are seeing in the market now is that the market is going for secure environment. Thus, security is becoming paramount. A lot of growth is happening not only in accessing the network in the wired space but also wirelessly. We are launching many products which support high-speed wireless transmission and that is seeing a lot of growth.

Though earlier also it was known that ProCurve belongs to HP, but how has it been since the coming together?

At the moment ProCurve does not exist as a separate brand. HP Procurve is now HP Networking. We have completed our acquisition with 3Com back in April 2010. Now, ProCurve, H3C (H3C is a brand of 3Com) and 3Com have merged together to create a brand called HP Networking. We have also merged all its product line and now there exists a single product line with the same set of partners. There is no differentiation or no specific demarcation among ProCurve or 3Com or H3C. These are all merged to form a single entity.

How has your service support network enhanced as a result?

HP's service support network is the same for all its products. We use the same infrastructure for the PCs, servers or any other product. Hence, the infrastructure that we used in ProCurve is being used now as well. It has remained the same on the competency level to reach the maximum number of locations across India. Today, we are offering the whole range of products we have through the same infrastructure. So, I believe the customers who were using 3Com or H3C earlier now have a renewed reach of reaching the whole country with HP service network support.

Are you still adhering to your old exclusive bunch of partners or have you started banking on HP's loyal partners too?

Even earlier, we were HP. So whatever partner base we had earlier, we continue to maintain them. We have integrated with 3Com partners as well. So, we have the HP set of partners and 3Com set of partners integrated into one team which is now the HP set of partners as well. The channel is now far stronger and all the partners are integrated under one brand umbrella. Now, it is a far more robust product line and channel community. 

Share some new HP Networking channel programmes and strategies?

We have been launching a number of programmes down the quarters. Many of them are focussed on driving sales and some of them are tactical in nature. Now, we are launching more programmes, we have launched a programme called expert one where we are focussing on creating a partner community who are completely trained on delivering HP's networking and Cloud and Data Centre Solutions. We are also giving networking scholarships to partners to train people in which they can actually get specialized training from HP and get their sales and pre-sales force trained. We are using this programme to create momentum to the channel and enable them to make more profitable sale to the customer. 

For More Contact :
Moumita Deb Choudhary
moumita@varindia.com