With 18 years of experience in the tech field, Hewlett-Packard (HP) Philippines’ new Managing Director is confident in expanding her horizons in the arena of information and communication technologies (ICT).
PhilSTAR Tech sat down with Ida Ong-Co, one of the country’s most visible Filipina leaders in technology, as she shared her onboarding experience with HP for the past five months.
“Bigger scope and bigger company. But I can actually say that I can apply all my experiences, not only on the sales side but also on the project management side, which are important for my new role as a managing director,” She said.
Ong-Co has worked for a few other global technology companies and received several awards for her leadership.
And with the first 90 days with her new leadership role at HP, her task was to understand its culture first. The new managing director said that she knew everyone has a different function and specialized skills for their respective work. As a leader, she wanted to be able to “integrate” these functions with each other.
“That’s why I’m actually learning the specialty of everyone and how it can have them working together, integrating them, in understanding what are their respective contribution,” she said.
Ong-Co said that she wanted to have everyone work together toward their one goal in HP. Having everyone on one time is the “most important thing” to her.
“I think as a start, it’s really understanding the people and their personal operational workflow,” she said.
Directing the future of HP Philippines
Just as how the future of HP Philippines seems to lean on Ong-Co, the future of AI-enabled PCs and sustainability of its products. This is something Ong-Co admitted to be looking forward to.
“Since AI has been the talk of the town for the past months, and HP is expanding and continuously innovating, for us to offer a wide range of AI-enabled PCs. We’re really looking forward to that,” she said.
As AI continues to transform the way people work, the demand for high-productivity AI laptops will inevitably increase. Thus, the increase in production will require measures that will guarantee sustainable designs for products.
With this, Ong-Co said, “We’re really up for sustainability, meaning the parts of our HP products were made from recyclable materials. We’re not just serving Filipinos with sustainability, but also around the world.”
Moreover, HP Philippines plans to involve itself to more public sector services. Ong-Co said they supportive of the government’s directive of digitalizing education.
“We have those tools, those resources, training programs, in order to observe government solutions, to equip them to be ready for the digital world.”
Other than than, Ong-Co said that the plan in expanding their coverage involves more than investing in retail. Their true objective, she said, is to really go down to the cities with small population and small economy.
She believes that getting “easy access” to technology is essential to small and medium enterprises and BPO industries as well.
“It’s more of making these sectors—we want to improve their efficiency by having all the complete product of HP be offered to them,” said Ong-Co.
As she talked more about HP’s future, Ong-Co noticed that consumers today already “know what they want.”
Today’s market is lead by IT vendors adapting to the needs of the consumers, said Ong-Co.
She added, “Consumers really want seamless connectivity. They want something that can enhance their productivity and also security.”
HP, which began in 1939, is a multinational information technology company that offers hardware, software, and other business-related services.
Meanwhile, the HP Philippines Corporation began in 1994 in the country as a regional sales and marketing office of its US-based parent.
