HP South Africa's distributors, resellers and alliance partners converged in Johannesburg for the company's first Proximity Partner Awards evening late last week and executives lauded channel partners for their contribution to the company's success this year.

Thibault Dousson, HP South Africa managing director said the company had successfully followed through on an opportunity identified by team members nearly a year ago.

"They came to me last year and said we can actually do better. That we can really bring proximity partners together and make it a success. Now obviously we need to bring distributors and get them involved. Your AxizWorkgroup, your Pinnacle, your Tarsus, your Kolok, your Drive Control and others. They all came together and said let's invest. We invested and put some effort into it and you guys came to the partry to the point where we almost doubled the business we did with you guys to about half a billion rand this year."

Yugen Naidoo, channel manager for HP South Africa emphasised the value HP derives from the sale of printers and PCs by its channel partners across the country. "We are a channel centric organisation. HP South Africa, HP worldwide are channel centric organisations. 91% of our business is through our channel model."

Naidoo told ITWeb Africa that HP is empowering smaller partners to do more business in the private and public sectors.

"It is part of the whole BEE strategy as well. We are really empowering the smaller businesses in South Africa. So if you look around today it is not your big guys, it is the smaller guys operating out of the boots of their cars. The question is what is next for them and at HP what we are doing is the sales and skills development in addition to empowerment in pricing so that they can be on par."

Naidoo also revealed that HP has 5500 partners around South Africa with the aim to reach the 6000 mark by the end March next year.

Winning partners

The biggest award of the night for the Business Partner of the year went to Valucorp, which also won the PC Business Partner of the year award.

Other winners were GRATZ GLOBAL CC who took home the Print Business Partner of the year award, XOFFICE STATIONERS CC won the Supplies Business Partner of the year, while Big Time Strategic was named the Public Sector Business Partner of the year.

* Image supplied by strikeaposephotography