Hewlett Packard
HP Unison Partner Portal revolutionizes partner experiences with single entry point for 650,000 users
partner.hp.com
A passion for partners
The HP Partner Portal transformation story and data in this case study relates to Hewlett Packard Company and the HP Unison Partner Portal prior to the company separation on November 1, 2015. The HP Unison Partner Portal was separated into the HP Inc. Partner First Portal and the Hewlett Packard Enterprise Partner Ready Portal in line with the businesses of each of the new companies. Both HP Inc. and Hewlett Packard Enterprise are Fortune 50 technology companies who are committed to providing partners with the best possible partnership experience.
The ugly truth
In 2013, when Anne Anderson was appointed as Senior Director of Partner Portal and Experience at HP, she was faced with aging partner portals running on 10-year-old technology that had few fans among the technology giant’s 250,000 partners worldwide. Partners’ interactions with HP were dispersed across several disjointed portal experiences, scores of online tools, and all with different login steps. To make matters worse, about 3,000 worldwide content owners from across the company were publishing to the various sites with few controls in place. Pages displayed up to 20 information links at a time. Further, an audit found that nearly 80 percent of the content was more than a year old.
A benchmark review of other companies’ partner portals found that HP was far behind its competitors in delivering best practice partner experiences. In order to grow the partner business, which made up 70 percent of the company revenue, HP needed a radical rethink, supplanting the older portals with a single, modern portal offering.
We moved from uncompetitive to competitive. The HP Unison Partner Portal built on Liferay placed HP ahead of other vendors in our market.
Taking an outside-in approach
Anderson and her extended team determined they also needed to radically change their approach from ‘inside-out’ to ‘outside-in.’ They sought extensive feedback from HP’s partners and, armed with 10,000 survey comments, input from partner forums, and best practice advice from portal experts, decided they needed to invest in a new portal technology that could handle the complexity of:
• 3,000 content providers
• 650,000 users across 174 countries in 25 languages
• Diverse business units with millions of HP products
• A multi-tiered channel program
• Radically different types of partner businesses
• Variety of user roles among partners
• Global, 24×7 operations
Following an extensive selection process, HP chose Liferay as its new portal platform due its ability to support a design that was flexible enough to deal with the complexity, while providing the dynamic features needed for targeted user experiences.
The Liferay Difference
• Ease of use to enable 3000+ content providers
• Serving 250,000 partner organizations in 174 countries in 25 languages
• Complex permissioning for multitiered partner program
• Customizable, dynamic homepage and dashboard
• 50% jump in partner adoption and utilization
A single global entry point
In just 11 months, the HP team and its technology partners were able to go live with the new HP Unison Partner Portal to HP’s top global partners. Over the following 13 months, Anderson and her team consolidated all business tools and information on one portal platform, retired seven legacy portals and rolled out the new partner portal to 100 percent of its 170,000 channel partners worldwide. “Letting go of legacy systems is often one of the biggest challenges faced by enterprise IT teams. With the new Partner Portal based on Liferay we were able to overcome this challenge and replace seven legacy portals,” said Pierre Masure, IT Transformation Manager for HP. Using Liferay as the underlying platform, and for the first time in company history, HP was able to offer all its partners a single global URL and entry point to all of the services and tools available within the partner ecosystem: including a catalog of products, deal registration, order management, quoting and compensation, training and marketing support. Additionally, a customizable dashboard allows users to self-configure the business tools they use most to their homepage for rapid, 1-click access. Through the new HP Partner Portal, partners were able to receive content in a targeted and relevant way through a multi-level set of permissions to deliver meaningful news, promos, homepage content, notifications, banners and more.
The new partner portal was key to HP’s overall global partner strategy and keeping the portal’s performance level high at all times was paramount. “If the site was down in peak hours, HP was losing tens of millions of dollars an hour,” Anderson said.
The key features and benefits of the HP Unison Partner Portal included:
• One partner portal with a global URL and single login to the entire HP partner ecosystem.
• Navigation organized by partner task rather than HP business structure.
• Clean, clear, consistent structure and search for easy-to-find content.
• Quick access to tools: one-click away from content and applications through customizable homepage dashboard.
• Improved performance using HP Moonshot Servers, customized Liferay extensions and real-time monitoring worldwide for rapid response to issues.
The result: more partners, more use, greater satisfaction
A year later, partner satisfaction was at an all-time high. The implementation of the Liferay technology helped HP achieve:
• More content in less time: Session times down by 33%, but 30% more content consumed during each session.
• Increased portal adoption and utilization: 92% of users visiting multiple times a week, 84% of users visiting multiple times per day.
• More effective selling: Frequent portal users winning opportunities valued 17 times higher than infrequent users.
• Partner satisfaction improvements: Triple digit increases in partner satisfaction scores across the board.
• Support efficiency gains: 85% reduction in visits requiring support. Following the launch of the HP Unison Partner Portal, an independent study showed that HP’s portal was leading its competitors in three of the 12 categories of the benchmark established during the initial evaluation.
“We moved from uncompetitive to competitive,” Anderson said.
“The HP Unison Partner Portal built on Liferay placed HP ahead of other vendors in our market. With company separation on November 1, the Unison Partner Portal became the HP Partner First Portal and the HPE Partner Ready Portal and remains a key tool for supporting both businesses worldwide.”