HP’s Chris Hewlett on what he’s learned over the last 25 years at the company

Discusses how he has seen the IT channel industry shift.

Chris Hewlett is celebrating 25 years at HP, and reflecting on the past years he explains how the IT channel has changed and what the future might bring for the computing giant.

Hewlett began his time at HP as the personal systems group (PSG) enterprise account manager 25 years ago in 2000.

Since then, he has held roles in the print and personal systems, holding national sales manager roles before moving to the PSG commercial channel as director. In 2023, he landed the senior director of commercial channel.

Speaking to CRN Australia, Hewlett said over the years he has learned the crucial role partners play in an organisation.

“Many of our partners have grown their organisations from the beginning. Learning from what they're doing is has been important,” he said.

“Learning from a diverse range of team members and their own perspectives on how to approach a problem or a challenge, that's important.

“Learning to address things quickly and honestly and with integrity is very important, showing up, listening, learning and trying to improve every day in whatever we do.”

Understanding what a partner's capabilities are and motivations is important for a vendor, but do that, you need to build strong, long, lasting relationships, Hewlett explained.

“They're not ones that sort of are transactional, the greatest sort of partnerships we have are with those organisations that are willing to sit down and do some meaningful planning and engagement together,” he said.

“Then we partner together and this is not just a HP and reseller thing. There's also a distributor component and an alliance partner component to that as well.”

From there these key organisations come together and support what their objectives are, what the customer outcomes are, and who they’re trying to serve.

“The greatest partnership style is when we come together as one customer, partner and vendor, achieving an outcome for whatever's the customer needs to sort of focus on,” Hewlett explained.

“Where we see the greatest growth and opportunities when we sit down with a partner who has similar values to HP, and ones that are willing to try new things, ones that are willing to support our collective growth opportunities and then go ahead against the hard work that we go with every week.”

In the past 25 years, the channel has seen an influx of new technologies from public cloud, to AI, to faster PCs. Hewlett told CRN Australia how all this change has impacted the IT channel space.

“The channel is constantly changing, we're on the cusp of some new partners that are going to be out there that are going to make some big impacts in the industry,” he said.

“We have our existing partners who are adopting that technology, not only to make themselves more productive or providing offerings to their customers itself.

“We're seeing new partners come out there and change offerings to customers.”

Opportunities and challenges

AI, future of work, and enhanced solutions are some of the opportunities that Hewlett identified as opportunities for partners.

“Customers adopting AI for their own use, for their own productivity and their own growth within their own organisations,” he explained.

The second opportunity is around hybrid work, according to Hewlett.

"That's not just having a device that is able to be mobile, but there's the entire ecosystem around that,” he said.

“Whether it's having great audio systems, to have conferencing facilities, because it doesn't matter where you work you want to be able to show to show up in your best way online.”

On the other hand, Hewlett noted economic influences and the Windows 11 migration as a challenge for partners.

“We've had long term high interest rates, which is causing some uncertainty and investment from customers,” he said.

One of the things that is impacting his partners, particularly in the in the end user compute space, is around the Windows 10 to Windows 11 migration.

“That's created a lot of urgency around many end users, around moving to Windows 11 supported device,” he said.

“Some are more planned than others in that space which is, which is important.”

Hybrid work also poses some issues for partners as they still figure out the best working system for their staff.

“Coming out of the changes that happened a number of years ago through Covid, many organisations are still evolving through what their employee base looks like,” he explained.

“Whether that's a government or a corporate organisation, hybrid work is well and truly there. Even if you look at what happens across Australia, different states have different percentages of back to work versus working from home.

“Partners understanding their customers, their customer base, what the customer is trying to achieve, and how their employees are situated, as far as a hybrid work, can create different opportunities for those partners as well.”

Being in the industry for 25 years, Hewlett has advice for those vendors on how to look after their partners.

“Showing up, listening, learning, asking questions, understand what objectives are trying to be achieved,” he said.

Secondly, he said leader and executives should always try and improve what they do every day.

“I find that when you do show up and when you listen, the relationships do grow, rather than us just spruiking a solution for the fact of us having it. We really need to understand that it is focusing on those little things,” he ended.