Mary Ann Yule believes the message of the new HP has strong resonance in Canada, particularly with the emphasis she has made since taking over of having HP’s Canadian staff be more empathetic to partners.

BOSTON — At the new HP’s first Global Partner Conference event in Boston, HP has presented a clear message of strategy to its partners. The change generated by today’s market trends means opportunity, which translates into growth for HP and its partners. The new company’s greater focus allows it to innovate better, which will enable it to do well in the pockets of higher growth opportunities in the PC and printing markets, and develop the more future focused technologies like immersive computing and 3D Printing. Canada has not been a hotbed of cutting edge tech adoption historically. However, Mary Ann Yule, who has now been six months on the job as Managing Director at HP Canada since coming over from CDW Canada, thinks that the Canadian market is highly receptive to the company’s strategic focus.

“In the six months since I’ve been here, I’ve met with about 150 customers and partners,” Yule said. “There are places in Canada that DO lead. We have some customers who are advanced, who are ahead of the curve. We have customers in Canada for Sprout, our immersive computing platform.”

HP is now emphasizing its ability to be transformative and disruptive as a separate company, something that Yule says HP in Canada is already doing.

“There’s an agenda to be transformative – to be disruptive in how we go to market – to take share and win,” she said.

Yule said HP’s disruptive capacity was something that attracted her to the company in the first place.

“I have a history with HP, and saw the opportunity for more agility there, to improve the decision making, and clean up some processes,” she said. “My history, coming from the channel with CDW Canada, means I recognize the importance of the channel overall, and to Canada in particular. I have put a priority on having the sales organization have more empathy for the channel and how it operates, and getting them to know more about the channel than they have in the past.”

While Yule has implemented some significant supply chain restructuring on the retail side, impacting the consumer business, the commercial channel market has not seen significant changes. But the corporate reshaping has brought about changes to both processes and resources.

“From an operational point of view, there are material differences,” said John Cammalleri, HP Canada’s channel chief. “We are making decisions quicker, because smaller organizations have to make decisions quicker. Our process flow to enable people to make decisions locally has changed dramatically.”

Cammalleri also said that the change from the old HP Canada was also significant with respect to the availability of resources out of the U.S. before.

“We’ve received a lot more support from the channel operations team in the U.S.,” he said. “We now have access to account operations managers in Canada – AOMs – which we typically didn’t have before. They work with Tier One partners to improve order management.”

HP made a big splash at GPC with the acquisition of Samsung’s A3 printer business, making a major push into this market, and targeting the sector for long term 40 per cent market share, up from the 5 per cent they have at present. Yule expects similar performance in Canada.

“The opportunities there are huge,” she said. “There is an active independent A3 channel in Canada, and some of those partners are working with us now. Limitations existed in our portfolio, however. Our partners that currently sell A3 are selling HP A3 but there is tremendous room for growth there because we are extending our portfolio with the Samsung printers. We will significantly augment this business with the new A3 printers in our portfolio.”

Cammalleri said the A3 boost will also help HP Canada’s managed print services business significantly.

“Our highest growth profile in print hardware and supplies are channel MPS partners – partners who have created their own managed print offerings,” he said. “Before the Samsung acquisition, those same partners who have been growing market share for us over the past two years in MPS have been doing so having to use competitive A3 copier solutions. We view this as an opportunity to accelerate our growth in MPS, and we can see this accelerating at a very good pace.”

“The adoption of ‘X as a service’ is only going to continue to evolve,” Yule said. “That’s what we will be seeing throughout our business,”

Yule also emphasized that HP’s focus on security as a differentiator throughout all its product lines will continue to pay dividends going forward.

“There is a growing trend in the marketplace around privacy, even among consumers who have been less concerned with privacy and security than the commercial market. Customers will always prefer companies they feel secure with.”

“The security line is blurring between commercial and consumer, Cammalleri said. “It’s all coming together, especially for the millennial cohort.”