D&H Canada head Greg Tobin reviews what worked well for the distributor in 2017, and offers some previews for the year ahead.
HP made its first announcement of a consumer product family at a channel event, as it expects the channel will sell almost all of these new rigs, and while much of it will go through etailers and retailers, there is a VAR channel play here as well.
In addition to providing increased benefits for those partners who elect to sell only Panasonic rugged notebooks, Panasonic has also increased its investment in a channel account team to provide more reps to work with partners.
At a partner gathering in Toronto, Byrne recounted Dell EMC’s channel trumps – but also detailed where the company needs to improve, and provided broad hints about upcoming channel changes.
Growth was good pretty much across all D&H segments, although notebooks, collaboration and video conference solutions, systems components, and even printers, all did exceptionally well.
HP Sure View is available as an option on two HP commercial models, HP EliteBook 1040 and HP EliteBook 840.
Storage, video conference, monitors and software and licensing all came in around 40 per cent or more. Greg Tobin, General Manager in Canada, discusses why D&H did much better than the industry average.
Dell commercial boss Kirk Schell reiterated Dell’s commitment to the space and discussed some ways Dell intends to differentiate itself from the competition.
HP’s new Spectre is a consumer product, so won’t be sold by the channel, but it of channel interest because of some interesting design decisions made to create the world’s thinnest notebook – while still using Core i5 and i7 processors.
Dell unveiled a host of new products at this year’s CES including new monitors and consumer notebooks, but for the channel, the main story is new commercial notebooks with consumer features taken from Dell’s XPS line.
Dell’s North American head Bill Rodrigues laid out Dell’s plans for growth to partners at Dell’s PartnerDirect Summit at Dell World.
Several new desktops, all-in-ones and notebooks were announced, with HP emphasizing new design, security and collaboration features, some of which are unique to them.
Dell’s hardware designers explain their original mandate, to turn Dell from a follower to a leader in product innovation, and discuss their design philosophy and principles that underlay the large degree of success they have in this area now compared to a decade ago.
The major news here is the introduction of an entirely new product, the HP EliteBook Folio 1020 family, which HP is touting as the thinnest and lightest business-class notebooks in the industry, and which is targeted mainly at the executive market.
Lenovo’s view is that the telcos are the preferred route to market for Motorola, but Lenovo also wants to go to market with alternative routes as well, to get more devices to more people.
A new partnership will see HP, Microsoft and Intel work together on a cohessive commercial mobility strategy from hardware through to go-to-market strategy.
Lenovo continues to woo the channel community by providing resellers with upfront rebates, simplified purchasing and sales reporting and expedited payments.
Members of Synnex’s Canadian Varnex community need to engage, or its time for them to move on, distributor says.
Lenovo Canada’s chief says the PC vendor is gaining ground in areas outside of its traditional enterprise and public sector strongholds.
At a time when HP CEO Meg Whitman says former allies Microsoft and Intel are now rivals, HP’s move towards Chromebook show the challenges Windows faces.
