Last Year’s No. 1 newsmaker slipped to No. 11, but that does not mean Paul Tsaparis, president and CEO of Hewlett-Packard (Canada) Ltd., had an insignificant year.
On the contrary, Tsaparis was front and centre in the media levy debate. As part of the newly-created Canadian Coalition for Fair
Digital Access (CCFDA), Tsaparis worked with Industry Canada and Heritage Canada to stop the levy that would see the cost of a pack of 100 blank CDs soar 181 per cent.
Tsaparis even said that HP Canada would consider removing products from store shelves if the levy became so high that it would affect pricing.
Pricing, he said, that the consumer would never pay.
Internally, HP Canada’s channel team, under the Partnerone.ca program that streamlined 40 channel programs into one in late 2002, rolled out elite channel designations this year.
With the help of HP Canada’s director of channel Derek Smith, the subsidiary created channel designations — including enterprise storage elite, OpenView elite and ProCurve elite — to recognize partners in enterprise storage, network and systems management software and networks solutions and services.
The company also opened a PC manufacturing facility in Toronto intended to help HP Canada reduce order/delivery cycle times by 78 per cent. The facility, which was spearheaded by Lloyd Bryant, HP Canada’s vice-president and general manager of its personal systems group, was originally an HP warehouse.
Before openning the facility, HP Canada had an order-to-delivery cycle time of 15 to 25 days. With this new facility, that cycle time has been reduced to five to eight days.
The move is expected to help HP Canada’s distribution partners Ingram Micro Canada, Tech Data Canada, Synnex Canada and Multimicro service its respective resellers bases better.
Certainly a far cry from the huge HP/Compaq merger integration project Tsaparis did wonders with last year, but still a very significant year for the CEO.