The sustainability of technology vendors' distribution channel could hold many back from meeting their ESG targets, and HP has made efforts to ensure its partners are onboard with them on its sustainability journey.
HP set itself the goal of becoming the most sustainable technology company in the world and as a company that claims to have the channel as part of its DNA, aligning partner organizations towards this goal was vital for success.
Four years ago HP introduced its global channel sustainability, Amplify Impact, to do just that, setting itself the goal that by 2025 more than 50% of its Amplify partners would take part in the program.
On stage at HP Amplify 2025 in Nashville, Kobi Elbaz, SVP and GM of global revenue operations, shared that HP has met this target. The next step, he said, will be to continue working with channel partners to ensure it can meet its larger goal of leading the tech industry in sustainability.
Speaking to ITPro, Mary Beth Walker, head of global channel strategy at HP, set out why HP needed to build the program to stay on track to meet its 2030 aspiration.
“We realized a few years ago that if we wanted to be the most sustainable technology company in the world, which is our goal by 2030, we can’t do business with partners who don’t care about sustainability and customers don’t necessarily want to buy from partners who don’t care about sustainability.”
Walker noted that a large part of this program centered around sharing the sustainability learnings HP had developed internally to its channel partners via the Amplify Impact program.
“It started out as a program to really help partners, especially smaller partners, take advantage of all the money that we had invested in sustainability training. They can’t afford to do that so let’s just share our training with them,” she explained.
“We also shared road maps for them to create a sustainability strategy, to be able to know how to produce a sustainability report and basically create the credentials that they need to be able to show customers that they have the capabilities and care about sustainability so customers want to do business with them.”
Sales boosts for HP channel partners
Walker said the results have shown channel partners who have committed to the program and received higher sustainability ratings through the Impact system have experienced a marked increase in sales.
“It’s been very successful, and the partners who have got those ratings are seeing the benefits in their sales,” she announced.
“We started getting statistics last year and the partners who are part of the program and established even a three star rating, 70% of them said that they got more sales this year than last year because of that.”
Not all HP’s partners have embraced the Impact program, however, with Walker acknowledging the firm has seen "diversity" in terms of how much value certain countries have attached to the program.
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She noted that HP is leaning into the areas of the world where this is the case to maximize global impact.
Walker added that HP has not come up with a plan for a potential scenario where non-compliant channel partners are holding it back from meeting its 2030 target, but ultimately that channel partners cannot afford to not have a sustainability strategy in place.
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