HP Amplify Future Ready Partner Capabilities

Channel partners are essential for driving innovation and reaching new markets in today's dynamic business environment. In an exclusive interview with CRNtv, we explore how HP Amplify helps partners build future-ready capabilities, tackle challenges, and grow their businesses. Industry experts Mary Beth Walker from HP and Mike Turicchi from NCS Technologies discuss these key topics and data insights. Mary Beth: HP Amplify has helped NCS develop future-ready capabilities. Tell us about what that journey has been like for your organization. Mike: About 10 years ago NCS made a strategic decision to pivot from a PC box builder to HP reseller and subsequently a solution provider with more service-oriented offerings. As our organization matured, we gathered data and established metrics to measure our performance over time. We used the data to improve our processes, but we found the data to be overwhelming and the analysis was cost prohibitive. HP Amplify Data Insights makes it easy to use data collaboration to generate insights. HP Amplify Data Insights has helped us identify key strategic areas for growth by providing historical data from sales to our customers. Mary Beth: Did you know that partners using Data Insights are growing twice as fast and driving better sales conversion rates than partners that aren’t? As you have pointed out, the value of insights is real. Can you offer some examples of what the outcomes of that experience have been for NCS? Mike: We’ve identified trends toward more service-oriented activities such as provisioning services that helped guide us to develop and implement specific capabilities, unique to NCS. In 2018 we invested in HP’s additive manufacturing technology and fully embraced the opportunities it brought to the table. In fact, we have since leveraged our 3D printing capabilities to make a significant amount of the components that we used to buy from other suppliers. This has not only saved us money but also improved our design capabilities and it identified new additive manufacturing opportunities as a service bureau, generating additional revenue. Mary Beth: What do you see as the biggest obstacles facing channel partners today? Mike: One of the biggest challenges has been the supply chain and economic uncertainty. For example, we are focused on Federal Government customers and as such, we are dependent on Congress to pass a budget each year. This can be especially uncertain in an election year. This year the Federal budget wasn’t passed until late March. That means the buying window for the Government has been compressed to six months, which causes industry-wide surges in demand that lead to supply chain shortages. It’s a domino effect. HP has a strong focus on the Government buying process and does the best job at this.