Archive for January, 2011

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Major iQuote PSG Portfolio Drive

January 24, 2011

HP EliteBook 2740p Tablet PC added as well as 100+ Notebooks, Desktops and Personal Workstations. iQuote is having a PSG blitz with lots and lots of new System Units and Options being rolled out to users. Seriously well over a hundred systems across Top Value, European A Model and US Smart Buys and A Models. We haven’t put this amount of focus on PSG since we first launched it back in November 2009.

Our aim is to show the complete Commercial PSG Portfolio so when you go to iQuote you’ll always be able to quote the model that suits your customer. Also did you know that iQuote Swift, iQuote Shopping List and iQuote Solution Builder also works with PSG ? They do and they make quoting anything HP better and easier.

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Jan 2011 iQuote Utilisation is Flying

January 24, 2011

Our iQuote Users have started the New Year impressively. A big thank you to all of our iQuote evangelists and users. The UK, USA, South Africa and United Arab Emirates are leading the way. The USA only went live in late December and it is already making an impact.

New Quotes:
It took us about 18 months to reach a weekly New Quote figure of 1000 quotes (27 September 2010). By the 12th of Jan 2011 this doubled to 2000 New Quotes per week. 12 days later we’re almost at 2500 New Quotes per week.

Saved Quotes:
We’re approaching 1000 Saved Quotes per week – this is 10X on Jan 2010.

Pitch Rate has increased (the number of options quoted per system unit), the number of users has increased but importantly the number of quotes per user has also increased. Remember that quotes are put together by iQuote Users so this is your success, although we’d like to take some of the credit !

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Options Descriptions Spring Cleaning

January 13, 2011

iQuote Options Descriptions are being improved – Hard Disk Drives for Servers already done. So not quite Spring yet in the UK but Spring cleaning has started. Our aim is to make our Options Descriptions as consistent and complete (useful) as possible. This is because we know that many iQuote descriptions are viewed by End Users plus it helps when browsing.

Example Hard Disk Drive Options Format:
530888-B21 HP 160GB 3Gb/s 7.2k rpm NHP SATA SFF (2.5in) Dual-Port MDL HDD 1yr Warranty

Part Number (530888-B21)
Vendor: (HP)
Capacity: (160GB)
Bus Speed: (3Gb/s)
Disk Speed: (7.2k rpm)
HPL/NHP: (Hot-Pluggable/Non-Hot-Pluggable)
SATA/SAS: (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment/Serial Attached SCSI)
Factor: SFF (2.5in)/LFF (3.5in) (Small Form Factor/Large Form Factor)
Ports: (Single-Port/Dual-Port)
HP Market Positioning (Entry/Midline/Enterprise)
HDD (Hard Disk Drive)
Warranty (1yr/2yr/3yr)

To show the Warranty on the Hard Disk Drives is really important as these Options do not carry the same warranty as the System Unit. Applying a Warranty Care Pack to a server does upgrade the Warranty on the Hard Disk Drives installed.

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iQuote Shopping List Technical Bulletin

January 10, 2011

New version of Shopping List is live. Unlike most iQuote updates, where new products or features are announced, this “Technical Bulletin” is to advise iQuote Host Distributors who were experiencing intermittent timeouts with Shopping List that the new version is live and sorts this issue. Apologies if you had any issues; it impacted about 4 Distis.

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iQuote Modification: hard disk drive configuration

January 10, 2011

Now easier to select your System Unit when browsing in iQuote. Some feedback from our US iQuote users that showing the hard disk drive configuration within a product description would help the user select. iQuote goes a little further and adds this to the browse range view (see graphic) as a separate line item.

For example, “Hard Drives: Hot-Pluggable 2.5in Small Form Factor Drive Bays: 4″ appears between the part number, price, stock and the full server description on one of the DL360 G7s.

There is a planned enhancement so that if a System Unit supports 4 hard disk drives as standard but can support a 2nd backplane that extends this to 8 iQuote will show “Drive Bays: 4 (8)” which is the same methodology as the table of contents uses.

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New Year, New iQuote Feature: Solution Builder

January 5, 2011

The most requested feature for iQuote is now live. iQuote users want to be able to merge quotes for different systems into a single quotation. Now you can with iQuote Solution Builder. Instead of adding a new application we decided to make it simple by leveraging the existing Saved Quotes view.

How to: just use the blue arrow to add either Saved or Exported versions of your quotes to create a solution. The quotes will then appear in a “Super Basket/Cart” like the graphic. Once you’ve finished combining quotations click on preview to view the quotations and then you have the facility to either preserve original pricing or refresh to current pricing. Once done you can export.

A number of additional functions are planned: the first is to allow the margin level to be changed for the Solution from the margin that was applied to each system; the second is to look for products that fit together (e.g. server and storage system) and provide some help around components needed for them to work together and the third is to allow users to store Solutions and retrieve them.

We hope you enjoy using iQuote Solution Builder. Best wishes for 2011 from the iQuote Team here at channelcentral.net.