Business devices manufacturer HP's future-ready strategy focuses on designing its devices and its services to provide greater resilience and flexiblity to its customers and users of its equipment, HP Southern Africa MD Yesh Surjoodeen has said.

The company's future-ready strategy focuses on people, including end-users and its channel partners, its products, and its customers' operations, he noted during a presentation this week.

"The global crisis precipitated by the Covid-19 pandemic made organisations in all industries realise that they need to be more agile. As an organisation, we have been focusing on improving our products, how we take them to market and on innovation to provide effective solutions to address our customers' needs.

"The environment is changing faster than we anticipated and a lot of our innovation has focused on future-proofing our products in various use-case scenarios," he said.

Further, the resilience and optimisation of operations, both in HP's and its customers' environments, rely on information and communications technology products, tools and components. These tools and systems are central to future-proofing operations.

"We are designing our product sets for the new ways people are working. It is important that people can adjust to the new work environments, including hybrid work environments where workers may work from various places at different times. Therefore, our products are designed to enable hybrid work environments," Surjoodeen added.

Further, the future-ready people aspect of its strategy focuses on the end-users of its products, its own employees and its channel partners.

Creating new solutions is not only about products and sales, but about creating and being part of a community that solves problems, he said.

"This is part of our HP Amplify programme, which aims to ensure that the tools, knowledge and skills are available in the ecosystem to bring effective solutions to customers.

"Data is necessary to solve the problems organisations are facing. To this end, we also provide data analytics tools and systems, built into our products, for our clients and our channel partners to enable end-users to generate data-driven insights into their organisations and operations."

However, the sustainability and future-proofing of organisations and their operations is linked to their resilience and agility, as well as the sustainability of the products that they use to render services to their customers.

"We are seeing demand for sustainability not only in corporate environments, but also from individuals. How sustainable and environmentally responsible products are is important, and we are designing our product sets to be sustainable on multiple levels.

"This includes our own sourcing of materials, how our products and components are used and how they are disposed or recycled once they reach the end of their lifecycle," he explained.

"We are also focusing on sustainability in terms of our product designs, responsible sourcing, packaging and logistics, as these have a material impact on our and our users' impact on the environment and global climate," said Surjoodeen.

Additionally, sustainability also requires equitable access to training and skills. HP has made various online training and skills development modules available to its partners and the general public to ensure that everyone can access opportunities to improve their organisations' operations and their own careers.

"Emerging markets require entrepreneurial skills. Small, medium-sized and microenterprises need to have access to the tools and skills to take to their clients. Our training modules, therefore, not only provide technical training, but also marketing, finance, negotiation and pricing skills training," he said.

HP's channel partners have responded positively to the focus on resilience and sustainability, with a South African channel partner securing a sustainability award at HP's global channel partner conference, in March, he highlighted.

"The HP Amplify programme is focused on the impact and value-addition of our products and that of our channel partners' services. These are in response to the changing dynamics we have seen in discussions with our clients and partners, as people want to buy from responsible companies that provide sustainable products and services," Surjoodeen noted.