New HP CEO Faces Partner Demands to Keep PC Business

Meg Whitmans's choice to not revert Apotheker's plan to get HP out of the PC market was, predictably, not warmly received by the majority of its business partners.

When Meg Whitman was suddenly put in Leo Apotheker's place, it was generally hoped that the choice to back out of the PC market would be canceled.

After all, the way the latter was let go so soon after the veritable scandal started was a clear giveaway that it was for that reason that the change happened.

However, Meg Whitman, the new chief executive officer, said she had no intention of reverting the decision to spin off the PC division.

This worked out about as well as one would expect, though the complaints exceeded the level of grumbling and became outright demands.

"Most of us in the channel want to see HP be more competitive with Apple and other device manufacturers that are coming up and taking a lot of our bread and butter business, and HP taking a step in that direction would be a positive," said Todd Swank, vice president of marketing at system builder Nor-Tech, according to CRN.

It is feared that, with the confidence in HP cut down, current partners will look for new hardware and software partners in the next few months. Acer already started to benefit, so this is not an unfounded concern by any means.

"I'd give it one to two quarters before you have cause for partners to start looking around to work with another company. I don't think you'll see [partners] abandoning HP, but you will see cause for them to look around for alternatives," said one HP solution provider who didn't want to be named.

The hope is now that the reason Whitman hasn't canceled the PC decision, and the Autonomy acquisition, is because she hasn't had time to review them properly. Whether or not this will happen sooner or later is still unclear though, so loyalty loss fears still remain.

"I don’t know if Whitman is the right candidate, but I don’t think she can be any worse than Apotheker, so at this point all we can do is give her a little time to get up to speed and take a swing at things," said Daniel Duffy, chief executive officer of Valley Network Solutions.