At last week?s HP Global Partner Conference held in Las Vegas, HP CEO and president, Mark Hurd, said in his opening keynote address that one of the main strategies for HP going forward will be to eliminate the complexity of doing business with the technology giant.

?HP?s complexity to do business with has been a consistent point of discussion from the majority of our partners,? he added, ?and elimination of these complexities is one of the driving forces behind the transformation through which HP is going currently.?

He also re-iterated that HP will be heavily focused on growing both its partner channels and direct channels, particularly those indirect channels that show unwavering commitment to HP.

?I always get asked the question about HP?s vision. But I think vision is overrated. My strategy for HP is not to ?out-vision? its competitors, but to ?out-innovate? its competitors,? Hurd stated.

He added that, possibly to the disapproval of the press and HP public relations teams, HP will not be an exciting company going forward, but will rather focus on delivering a consistent and predictable message to its partners.

?We will drive customer experience with boring predictability,? he commented.

HP celebrates 25 years of business with its partners this year, and says that it recognizes that the channel has had to adapt to changing business environments.

According to Jos Brenkel, vice-president: solution partners organization, HP EMEA: ?Today?s channel model has nothing to do with number of shipments. But it has everything to do with driving revenue and optimizing profit margins, hence the conference?s theme: ?Masters of the Game?.?

According to Jim McDonnell, senior vice-president: solution partners organization, HP, in Q3 this year, partners drove somewhere around 11 percent of growth for HP, totalling US$15 billion.

Also at the conference, Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer, spoke at length on the need for innovation, but said that innovation had to happen in the right areas.

In particular, he was very articulate on issues ranging from open source and Linux to driving partner velocity, which will open opportunities for partners to take on new business or gain market share over competitors.

?Too much of the dialogue around Linux and OSS has been religious, when business should really be focusing on cost benefit. I am beyond being convinced, and will take on any argument that Linux at client level is not viable, and a number of technology announcements in the coming months will see Microsoft making headway in Linux-dominated areas, such as Web hosting and high-performance cluster computing,? Ballmer said.

?Nothing will make HP and Microsoft happier than taking market share from Oracle, Linux and IBM,? he added.

Commenting on up-coming technologies from Microsoft, Ballmer said that the next twelve months will prove to be the most exciting from an innovation point of view.

In particular, Ballmer says that releases of Windows Vista (a.k.a Longhorn) and Office 12 will open new opportunities for partners to sell services and collaboration servers, and to manage customer IT refresh cycles.

-- Nicolas Callegari attended the conference in Las Vegas as a paid-for guest of HP.