How HP Is ‘Adapting To Changes’ To Meet An Increased Need For Technology

‘We’re ensuring that they’re equipped to be productive at home. We’re ensuring as well that we’re offering best practices around how to keep their environments and technology clean. We’re also making sure that they have access to resources on how they can ensure that they are staying healthy and connected during this time,’ says HP’s Alex Cho.

HP Inc. and its partners are quickly adapting to the new reality that has arrived amid the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.

In an interview with CRNtv, Alex Cho, president of the personal systems business at HP, talked about how the PC and printer vendor is addressing coronavirus-related concerns--and about the impact so far on HP.

“We think of this in three areas. One is taking care of our employees and our partners and customers. We’re also looking at the impact to our business and make sure we’re adapting to the changes, real time. And thirdly, we’re also thinking through, what does this mean mid- and longer-term to our business, and to our partner and customer community?” Cho said. “And that’s keeping us very busy now a days.”

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As far as mitigating the impact of the pandemic for employees, partners and customers, “we’re ensuring that they’re equipped to be productive at home. We’re ensuring as well that we’re offering best practices around how to keep their environments and technology clean,” Cho said. “We’re also making sure that they have access to resources on how they can ensure that they are staying healthy and connected during this time.”

Solution providers also talked to CRNtv about working with HP to meet customer needs during this crisis.

NWN President and CEO Jim Sullivan and Compugen President Harry Zarek said that HP has been an excellent collaborator, helping them meet the demands of a growing mobile workforce.

“HP has always been an excellent partner for us, but you can really tell who your best partners are when there is a crisis. So for us, with our device-as-a-service offering, which is based on HP technology wrapped around the NWN IP, it really is enabling workers to go remote with unified communications and device-as-a-service,” said Sullivan.

HP and its partners are also working with customers around adjusting financing terms in response to the crisis.

“Our customers are asking for delay-of-payment, you know, extended terms, more on a casual basis. What I mean by that is they’re saying, ‘We need an extra 15 or 30 days,’ and we’re certainly going to try to accommodate that as much as possible,” Zarek told CRN. “And in turn we’re asking both our vendors and our distributors to actually participate in the same way. And so, the kind of conversations we have is more around, we’re all going to have to take on a little bit of water here to try and accommodate everyone who is part of this complex ecosystem.”

Many personal systems are “going into key employees’ homes. A lot of them are going into front line health care facilities. And so we’ve go to react very very quickly,” said Zarek. “Historically, our business has been one we can forecast. It’s been really difficult obviously to forecast at this point and time. And so what we’re trying to do is, as soon as we get confirmed requirements from customers, we actually send that off to HP and let them know.”

Visit CRNtv to learn more.