HP: Partners key to delivering sustainability

HP has underlined the importance of sustainability and the role partners play in enabling customers to adopt greener technology and reduce carbon emissions.

Nancy Powell, sustainability manager of UK&I and EMEA markets at HP, provided an update on the progress the firm continues to make and underlined the continuing importance of sustainability to customers.

“It’s very much table stakes,” she said. “When we get tender processes that come through the door, all of them, with no exceptions, in the UK, would have a weighting now around sustainability and the kind of information that they’re asking for growing is expanding and extending.

“Sustainability is moving from being a ‘nice to have’ and something that you know was a differentiator to being something that can be a core part of what we offer.”

She added that HP had been working on the sustainability front for decades and was able to lean on those experiences to shape its approach and the guidance it could offer partners and customers.

“One of the things that’s very pertinent to us being able to talk effectively to our customers is our channel partners, a huge route to market, very significant in the UK,” she added. “Our partners are key collaborators, and us being able to have that sustainability conversation with the mutual customer who sits on the end of that.”

HP launched its Amplify Impact programme in 2021 and now has 4,000 plus partners signed up to gain knowledge and certifications around sustainability.

One of the elements of the programme is to enable partners to undertake self-assessments to gauge their own sustainability positions and Powell said that the numbers going through that process had increased 40% year on year.

“There are lots of partners that are finding it a useful way of measuring their own progress,” she said. “And obviously one of the key attributes of this is that we begin to understand each other, we understand the sustainability that’s important to them, and they understand what we’re working on, what we’re thinking about, and we can then take that to the customer.

“There’s great data around win rates and the increase in our partners and us understanding where sustainability is a component part of a deal, what the marketplace looks like, how sustainability is growing in that tender process,” she added.

Powell said HP continued to review the materials it used, opting for greater levels of recycled material, and had taken steps on the packaging front to minimise waste and using bamboo and natural fibres as alternatives to cardboard: “Like many vendors, we have a real ambition to remove single use plastics from all of our packaging.”

HP has recently made refurbished hardware available to partners in the UK, with the products backed by a one-year warranty.

Powell said customers were increasingly interested in ‘second life’ products that were refurbished but still provided the levels of performance and reliability users were looking for.

“Customers who are interested in buying those second life devices as new, whether it’s in print or in personal systems, and ultimately … in peripherals, as well headsets and so on, [are being catered to by the refurbished programme] which is purposely built,” she said.

“It’s an offer to customers through channel partners, and it’s got a one-year warranty attached to it, so everything that they would have experienced had they bought a new device would be wrapped around that product as well. The desire is that the experience for a customer should feel like buying a new device.”