HP Midmarket Initiative Points Channel Partners To Underserved $7.5 Billion Segment

Hewlett-Packard Co. said it has initiated a new program, called ten.to.one, as a lever to prompt sales from midsized enterprises, an underserved market that the vendor pegs at a $7.5 billion revenue opportunity.

HP named the project to reference its method for framing the midmarket—companies ranging in size from 10,000 to 1,000 employees—and described it as a growth accelerator for deploying, integrating and managing business technology solutions into that segment.

The company said that the portfolio for the ten.to.one program is tailored to the priorities of midsized businesses and includes performance testing software, a data protection product and an IT infrastructure manager.

HP has tapped a new organization, called Commercial Solutions, housed within its Software and Solutions business unit to execute the midmarket plan.

To mine the segment, HP said that it has armed its channel partners with sales and marketing tools, including training, certifications, boot camps and a social media community. In addition, the vendor is offering a service to help resellers build lead generation campaigns.

The vendor also is providing its folder of professional services, software education training and software-as-a-service offerings for channel partners to leverage in sales opportunities.

“We understand that while some organizations may like to work directly with HP, many midsized enterprises prefer to work with their trusted resellers,” said Jonathan Martin, vice president and general manager, HP Commercial Solutions division.

“This is why the ten.to.one initiative includes a key focus on our partner community,” he said. “Our goal is to enable the support of our partners so they are, in turn, better equipped to serve [midsized enterprises].”

In customizing its technology package for midsized enterprises, the vendor said it relied, in part, on a worldwide study it commissioned from researcher Forrester Consulting, entitled “2010 Business Technology Trends for Midsized Enterprises.” The study identified areas important to midsized enterprises.

“We identified that as the economy starts to pull into recovery, midsize enterprises are struggling with how they should focus, from purely saving money to fueling innovation—how do they flip the ratio from keeping the lights on to help the business drive competitive advantage with IT innovation,” said Martin.

“This is why we created ten.to.one, a new initiative designed to help midsized organizations grow their business without growing the complexity of their IT value chain,” he said.

Products tailored to midmarket needs

The performance testing software, called HP LoadRunner in the Cloud, has been made available on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) platform. Under a beta program for U.S. customers, HP has waived license fees for the product, offering it for now on pay-per-hour pricing.

“We’re leveraging the capacity and cost advantages of the cloud by introducing our market leading HP LoadRunner solution on the Amazon platform, delivering an affordable, pay-per-hour performance testing solution allowing our customers to ensure application performance for their mission critical business applications,” Martin said.

Midsized enterprises also identified security and risk management as top issues. Accordingly, HP spruced up its Data Protector product to give customers eight methods of protection when running environments using Microsoft Corp.’s Hyper-V Server 2008 R2.

“We’re helping organizations protect their virtual environments by bring our flagship HP Data Protector product to the Microsoft Hyper-V platform just as we’ve done previously for VMware,” Martin said.

HP also has included its SiteScope Operations Manager to help midsized businesses improve service availability and performance though more effective monitoring and management of IT systems and applications.

“For organizations wanting to quickly manage all the elements in the IT value chain, we have our new HP SiteScope Operations Manager, which quickly and easily manages the status of IT operations, identifies issues and initiates corrective action, helping customers be more responsive and efficient,” Martin said.