HP Plots Smartphone Channel Power Play

Credit: PND

The longer that Palm is a part of HP, the more we’re starting to hear about how they are going to put their weight behind webOS. We are now getting a nice peek into how HP plans to do their best to distribute Palm’s devices.

HP is building a whole new program dedicated to bringing webOS to both the consumer and corporate markets. Tom LaRocca, who currently runs HP’s PartnerOne channel program, will be running this new program. Steve DiFranco, vice president and general manager, Solution Partners Organization (SPO) Americas for HP was interviewed yesterday about this.

Our intention is to bring a fully serviceable set of services to the consumer and commercial markets based on the Palm OS,” DiFranco said. “Which apps are chosen and eventually deployed are the result of negotiations and conversations with the Palm team. I’m sure we will have consumer and commercial applications and to work with plug-ins. Palm, even before we acquired them, had a plug-in with Salesforce.com. We will continue down that road.

HP has been saying all along that they intend to use their global reach to distribute webOS to wherever they can. And how about the business market? DiFranco had plenty to say about that:

To a reseller doing data center, I can have a practice with Palm devices from HP because that device can be managed and secured through the data center,” said DiFranco. “One of our competitors in the phone business does a good job selling devices in corporate environments. But they’re not coming from a channel world. Now you have a company from the channel to have a device that has a smart enough OS to shut down if the device is lost or stolen. Now you can start to go out to customers with that.

We all know that webOS will work great for consumer devices. It will definitely be interesting to see it working on enterprise devices as well. Even though this is just a glimpse into HP getting set up for success, it’s nice to see. Hopefully it won’t be very long before we stop seeing just the indications of planning for webOS success, and start seeing them actually executing that plan.

[Source: ChannelWeb]