PCM Teams With HP On Strategic Briefing For Top Customers

Jari Koister, CTO of AgilOne, a cloud-based predictive marketing company that uses Hewlett-Packard Superdome business critical systems, says his company is considering buying more products and services from national IT services provider PCM Inc. and Hewlett-Packard after a daylong strategic briefing.

Koister, in fact, said he didn't realize the breadth and depth of the products and services from HP and PCM before the briefing and is now looking at buying both HP commodity servers and security software. "Clearly there is a bigger opportunity to work more with PCM and HP," he said.

Koister was one of more than 20 top PCM customers that participated Tuesday in a daylong briefing with executives from HP and PCM at HP's new state-of-the-art Executive Briefing Center at its Palo Alto, Calif., headquarters.

[Related: HP CEO Whitman: HP Puts Partners First In New Style Of IT Sales Offensive ]

The briefing included a look at cloud services from $1.5 billion PCM along with an overview of the complete product and services portfolio from $120 billion HP.

AgilOne is the kind of fast growing customer that could benefit greatly from the HP-PCM offerings. The strategic briefing covered HP's converged infrastructure strategy and HP servers including Moonshot, as well as HP networking, storage, mobility, and printers and personal systems.

Mountain View, Calif. based AgilOne spent more than $1 million on information technology in 2013 and is growing fast. In fact, AgilOne has experienced a 300 percent increase in its customer acquisition rate in the first six months of this year.

The new briefing center, which opened in January and is being used by HP partners for strategic briefings, is designed to provide customers an "immersive" experience to showcase innovative new products like HP Moonshot.

HP CEO Meg Whitman has touted the new briefing center as a symbol of HP's turnaround and proof of the company's continued commitment to partners and customers.

NEXT: PCM, HP Briefing Spark New Ideas On Opportunities And Solutions

Adam Shaffer, senior vice president of marketing for PCM, headquartered in El Segundo, Calif., said the briefing sparked new ideas on how PCM and HP can work together to bring "more opportunities and solutions" to the table for customers and is sure it will result in an increase in sales.

"We uncovered some customer needs that we didn't realize were there," said Shaffer. What's more, he said, customers seeing PCM and HP teaming together "arm in arm gives them more confidence to work with both of us."

Shaffer said the briefing opened the door for HP and PCM, which has over 1,250 services personnel and customer service centers that operate 24 hour a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, to capture a bigger share of wallet of the IT budgets of companies like AgilOne.

In AgilOne's case, Shaffer said, PCM is looking at new opportunities including a new data center build out in Europe and new HP 3Par storage sales. "We're hoping we can start adding more services over time as AgilOne learns about our capabilities," he said.

HP Senior Vice President of Worldwide Indirect Sales for the Enterprise Group Sue Barsamian, who addressed PCM customers at the briefing, praised PCM for taking advantage of the Executive Briefing Center to drive strategic solution sales across the full HP portfolio from desktop to data center. "In my mind, this is exactly the model for how we want to use the Executive Briefing Center," she said.

Partners like PCM bringing in a group of customers for a briefing inevitably opens the door to strategic discussions around issues like Windows 8, how to meet the needs of the new millennial workforce, and a wide variety of cloud computing issues, said Barsamian. "When you have a group of 20 customers, the discussion gets to be pretty rich," she said.

Barsamian has urged other partners to uses HP's new Executive Briefing Center to drive sales around the full HP product and services portfolio.

AgilOne's Koister, for his part, said he walked away from the briefing with a new understanding of the capabilities of both PCM and HP.

"It's been really exciting," he said of the briefing, which ended with a tour of DreamWorks Animation Studio, which uses HP technology as part of the animation movie-making process. "I have some things I want to follow up on. It's been an awesome day to get to know and understand the broader offerings of both companies."

PUBLISHED OCT. 22, 2013