Showing posts with label IT support. Show all posts
Showing posts with label IT support. Show all posts

Thursday, September 09, 2021

How HPE Pointnext Complete Care Transforms Edge-to-Cloud Support to Enable Business-Wide Outcomes

Transcript of a discussion on how complexity and fast-changing dynamics of digital businesses are pushing enterprises to seek a complete and holistic way to support all their technology.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise Pointnext Services.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the BriefingsDirect Voice of Tech Services Innovation podcast series. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing discussion on how IT services and support have entered a new era.

Today’s diversity of hybrid IT models and environments demands that IT services and support accommodate more digital variables than ever. Nonetheless, the burgeoning complexity and fast-changing dynamics of digital businesses are pushing enterprises to seek a complete and holistic way to support all their technology -- from every edge to every cloud -- in one bold stroke.

That’s the market driver behind a new pan-IT services offering from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Pointnext Services called HPE Pointnext Complete Care. The all-inclusive approach moves past product-based experiences of support to an all-IT-environment-wide experience. It both reaches back to provide legacy and product support and extends to the intelligence-driven and proactive optimization of all digital business services.

Stay with us now as we examine how HPE Pointnext Services has developed solutions to satisfy this broad new definition of complete IT tech support.

To learn more about bringing what amounts to a warm blanket of support across the entire IT environment we’re joined by Gerry Nolan, Director of Operational Services Portfolio at HPE Pointnext Services. Welcome back, Gerry.

Gerry Nolan: Hi, Dana. Great to be with you.

Gardner: Gerry, how has the world changed since HPE Datacenter Care arrived back in 2012? I guess we can no longer define IT by a datacenter metric -- it’s now gone much broader and wider.

Nolan: You said it, Dana. I feel a bit old thinking that 2012 was just yesterday. But back then the momentum was all around IT consolidation, the move to virtualization, and customers moving to x86 platforms.

IT’s not 2012 anymore

Nolan

At the time, studies showed that average downtime was about 97 minutes per year, with the average cost at $8,000 a minute. The most common cited reason for failure was the hardware, along with people making mistakes. At the time, about 50 percent of the downtime was caused by hardware failure and 50 percent by human error.

Today, studies show that the world is a totally different place. Now it’s all about hyper converged infrastructure (HCI), hybrid IT, and cloud computing in all its various forms. The move to edge is a significant trend. And, of course, the move to digital transformation has been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. And that means it’s all about IT as an experience and bringing differentiated experiences to the market.

Look at areas outside of IT. If you think about buying a car and how Tesla has transformed that experience or going on a vacation and how web sites such as Airbnb or Booking.com have totally transformed that. The experiences define those use cases -- and IT is no different.

In 2020, studies showed that downtime is even more scary -- with the average cost of a minute of downtime up from $8,000 to $17,000. With the move to digital, any downtime or impact to your digital platform has massive implications not just with the direct revenue and orders impact, but they can seriously damage your reputation and brand for years.

With the move to digital, any downtime or impact to your digital platform has massive implications not just with the direct revenue and orders impact, but they can seriously damage your reputation and brand for years.

An IDC study that jumped out at me last year, for example, says having a support experience around IT shouldn’t be viewed like it was back in 2012, as an insurance policy. Today it’s more important to think about partnership agreements that drive better service-level agreement (SLAs) and overall performance. It’s about driving the business forward and enabling the business.

IDC found the enterprises that had these types of agreements saved an average of 634 hours of unplanned downtime. And 200 hours of that were the benefit of the proactive nature of using artificial intelligence (AI) and other tools, as well as having access to smart people who help mitigate against the bad things from happening.

So, yes, the world really has changed a lot since we first introduced HPE Datacenter Care back in 2012.

Gardner: Sure, so we’ve seen the change of vendor and support relationships to more of a partnership in supporting the full business. But there’s been a progression to getting to what we now call HPE Pointnext Complete Care. And one of those big steps was with HPE Pointnext Tech Care. How did that fit into the progression? How should we think about this as an evolution?

Nolan: Yes, we are transforming the overall support experience for our customers. The first step out of the gate was differentiating the experience with our HPE products by crafting a new, totally transformed support experience called HPE Pointnext Tech Care. We launched that in April on our HPE Server product line. It will be fully available across all products by August.

Time to transform how we work

It transforms and uplifts the user experience when dealing with HPE products by bringing to bear a whole range of new aspects, including a new digital platform, to allow customers much easier access to both the knowledge they need as well as multiple ways of accessing our experts around the world. They can do that through video, chat, moderated forums, and live conversations. It also embeds AI, so the telemetry built into our products feeds back to the mothership and then delivers a wide array of dashboards, alerts, insights, and recommendations back to the customers.

As a result, the users have a beautiful, rounded, broader suite of capabilities that allows them to gain more information to more easily self-solve and self-serve. But, of course, they also have broad access to knowledge and expertise when and how they need it. That’s what HPE Pointnext Tech Care, which replaces HPE Foundation Care and HPE Proactive Care, is all about.

For those familiar with those services, which have been around for many years, HPE Pointnext Tech Care is the new, single product support experience for all HPE products. We’re very proud of it and we’re getting great feedback from our initial customers. They love that they can go to a single portal and see these dashboards. They now have many ways of accessing our experts, and, of course, everyone’s different. Some people like to talk live to experts, while others like to watch videos or go to moderated forums to talk with peers and other customers. Our experts are also in those forums responding and providing links to various articles.

It’s a very rich -- and we believe -- transformative experience that takes support to the next level. And, with HPE Pointnext Complete Care, we’re going to elevate that even more by taking support beyond the products and looking at the entire environment.

Gardner: Another big differentiator for HPE Pointnext Services is that this not just for HPE support -- this is pan-vendor support. You’ve been agnostic in supporting -- with one throat to choke, if you will -- a vast universe of technology. How does HPE Pointnext Complete Care advance that concept of all under the same support umbrella?

Nolan: Yes, we’ve been doing that for years, adding significant multivendor capabilities. With HPE Pointnext Complete Care, it focuses further on providing a complete support experience for the customer. That includes whatever capabilities exist -- both from inside of HPE or some of our partners – and brings all of that into a complete, single framework for the client. That means covering the customers’ complete IT environment, however they define it, by acting as their single point of contact for whatever they define as their IT. In these days, of course, that can be quite a wide and varied scope.

For example, a casino I recently talked to is actively acquiring new companies in different parts of the world. They’re bringing onboard those companies, all with their own IT setups. The chief information officer (CIO) is looking to bring all of that together under a single framework with a single partner to work with them. They want to evolve to control what they have, as well as take it all to a more standard framework.

Another company that jumps to mind is a large international bank looking to move to an increasingly hybrid IT structure, with some on-premises cloud services to support their legacy IT. They’re migrating from that legacy to an x86, container-based, heavily automated private cloud. They need a single partner to help them through that digital transformation and through that evolution. The goal is to help them operate and manage their old, while also taking care of all of that new technology.

HPE Pointnext Complete Care brings it all under one umbrella to give the customer a single team and a single point of contact. Whatever IT they have, they can work with that single partner to optimize the entire environment.

There are many aspects to HPE Pointnext Complete Care in terms of helping a customer in those different use cases. It’s not just HPE products. It’s many different IT technologies. Today that includes things such as hyper-converged, edge, and Internet of Things (IoT). There’s a lot of open source use, and a plethora of other software including some of the new automation tools.

HPE Pointnext Complete Care brings all of that under one umbrella to give the customer a single team and a single point of contact. So whatever they have in their IT -- wherever their IT is -- they can work with that single partner to operate and optimize that entire environment.

Gardner: The timing seems perfect because, as you mentioned, there’s so much more complexity to providing a business service that ultimately reaches back into multiple service providers, using multiple technologies.

Nolan: Exactly.

Gardner: We need those services to be robust. If there are issues, there’s no time to point fingers but instead to find the root causes and assign responsibility for fixing it. You need to look at the whole picture, and the speed element is something here that strikes me as essential.

Nolan: Absolutely.

Gardner: It seems to me that we’re looking at an awfully complex undertaking. How do you mitigate the complexity?

Comprehend complexity and manage it

Nolan: Yes, customers are challenged. We’re still in the pandemic. We’ve learned a lot from our customers as they have worked through all the various implications. The response has elevated the whole move to digital, as I mentioned. It’s really important that customers have a strong handle on the digital aspects of their businesses.

Whether you’re ordering coffee, buying a car, or doing some banking, you’re working with some level of digital platforms these days. Therefore, that becomes a critical aspect of enabling the business. We want to make sure we can help customers set up, run, and optimize their digital platforms – and that’s something HPE Pointnext Complete Care is set up to do.

Risk mitigation is critical. We see customers challenged with just trying to get ahead of issues before those issues cause downstream impact to their businesses. They want access to expertise and best practices. They are obviously always looking to get the best bang for the buck because customers are still under tight cost constraints.

They also have struggles due to the finger-pointing that comes with managing multiple vendors and as they bring on more open source software and automation tools. There are more and more companies involved, and so more and more and different relationships to manage. All of this can be challenging.

If you’re struggling with bandwidth and budget while trying to mitigate risk -- all these factors build to create challenges across all of those dimensions. Having a single point of contact is something we see customers challenged with -- and something they value a lot.

We also see organizations aim to reduce their carbon footprint and achieve new corporate-wide sustainability goals. So, that’s something we’re also building into the HPE Pointnext Complete Care value. Working with our financial services organization within HPE allows customers to benefit from their programs. They can monetize old hardware, and we can buy that hardware back and give the customer a payment that they can then invest in newer technologies -- more carbon friendly and sustainable approaches. So, we’re excited about how we can help customers across all these different dimensions.

Gardner: As a recap from our earlier discussion when HPE Pointnext Tech Care came out back in the spring, one of the things that was very impressive to me was the use of technology to better manage – technology. At HPE Pointnext Services, you’re using technology to trace and discover IT assets and use that data to gain a complete view of what’s going on in an organization.

Working with our financial services organization within HPE allows customers to benefit, too. They can monetize old hardware. HPE will buy it back so they can invest in newer technologies -- more carbon friendly and sustainable approaches.

It’s allowing not just break-fix reactions but the capability to get out in front and to be proactive on maintenance, patching, and to quickly identify anomalies to head them off before they become breakdowns. So, the advent of the technology that you’re able to use to satisfy these problems is also very powerful, and HPE Pointnext Tech Care demonstrated that. 

Nolan: Absolutely, well said.

Gardner: All right, let’s go to HPE Pointnext Complete Care in more detail. This has just arrived. People are trying to wrap their heads around it. What’s the grand vision for HPE Pointnext Complete Care now that we’ve moved through this evolution from HPE Pointnext Tech Care and better understand the IT environment that we’re in?

A warm blanket of IT support

Nolan: I view the HPE Pointnext Complete Care experience as that “warm blanket” of support that we can put around the entire customer’s IT environment. The beauty of the framework is we’re going to be delivering and evolving this over the coming months to provide a modular approach. That means we can provide flexibility across an extensive and growing menu of capabilities. 

Whether it’s looking at your security, compliance, or performance – this includes all the different aspects of your IT. It means managing your assets, be it hardware or the software licenses. And then we provide the innovative solutioning tools to our partners as well as our own staff to enable personalization for each of those different customer use cases I mentioned.

Yet every customer is different. They’re all starting from a different point on their journey. We will wrap around all those requirements that the customer has a single framework, a single team, a single contract, and a single invoice.

Everything needs to be simpler for the customer, even as their use cases have gotten more complex. It requires the wealth of HPE’s capabilities across all the technology -- or in the multi-vendor space. We have a massive capability globally to fix and repair non-HPE products. So, whether it’s Dell servers, or IBM systems, or Brocade switches, or NetApp storage arrays -- customers are often surprised that we can provide the same level of support on their non-HPE technology as their HPE technology.

We will keep investing in the digital platforms to bring forward all the AI and telemetry and make it more broadly available, as well as enriching the dashboards, alerts, and insights provided to customers that have the HPE Pointnext Complete Care framework. We will constantly make it better and help customers manage the lifecycle -- not just provide support.

If customers need to look at their strategy plans, we can bring in our strategy consultants. If they have a need for flexibility around payment plans or to monetize their older assets, we can partner with our financial services colleagues and bring them to the table. All of this can be done through a single HPE Pointnext Complete Care framework. It delivers a complete, end-to-end suite of value to cover all needs. That’s what makes our vision quite exciting for me. 

Gardner: When I first learned about HPE Pointnext Complete Care, I said to myself, “Wow, this is pretty ambitious.” And one of the things I wondered is how you’re able to manage being all inclusive -- providing a single point of contact -- yet at the same time personalize and customize the support experience for every customer. How are you able to pull that off, Gerry, to be  all-inclusive and simplified, but also customized and tailored to each company?

Nolan: That’s one of the beautiful things about HPE Pointnext Complete Care. We have a big benefit in that we’ve been doing this for – and I’m embarrassed because I’ve been here most of these -- 40 years. We’ve been doing support of customer’s technology -- whether it’s HP, HPE, or non-HPE technologies -- for a very long time. We’ve built up amazing global capabilities, whether it’s supply chain or expert teams that specialize in different areas like SAP HANA or security or VMware or Linux or automation or containers -- name your tech topic. We built up deep teams of experts that we can draw upon.

HPE Pointnext Complete Care is a big toolbox of capabilities across the company. We have teams that can readily help customers regardless of where they are on their journey. We're able to do this due to the sheer breadth of capabilities available to us.

If you can imagine, HPE Pointnext Complete Care is this big toolbox of capabilities across the company, as well as working with our partners, and that helps speak to a customer. You can view that customer in their own unique scenario. It’s very helpful when you can turn around and talk to your consulting colleagues and bring in some strategy or help for the customer who has a desire to move to cloud. They may need some help figuring out, “How do I architect a good solution for all my various workloads?”

Because we know that not every workload is going to work in the cloud, we know that customers don’t typically throw out all their old technology. They want to keep their old technology but also get the most from it for as long as possible while they move to the newer models. And we have teams within our organization that can readily help customers regardless of where they are on that journey.

Again, we’re able to do this due to the sheer breadth and depth of the capabilities available to us. It allows us to turn up and develop what appears a custom-built solution for each customer. But, in fact, we’re leveraging capabilities that have been built up over 40-plus years. We’re putting them together uniquely for each client and we have the flexibility to do that. We are not tied to any one model, whether it’s on-premises, off-premises, hybrid cloud, IoT, edge, and containers.

We don’t have any specific bias to pushing a customer in one direction. We have so many tools in our toolkit, we do the best for that customer and give them the outcome that best satisfies their unique needs with HPE Pointnext Complete Care. That’s the value proposition and the beauty of the framework. We pick and choose the tools, assets, and capabilities and we map those to each individual client.

Gardner: Let’s chunk this out a bit. What are the major modules in HPE Pointnext Complete Care? How should we think about it in terms of how it’s constructed and architected?

Personalized, customer-centric care

Nolan: Because we’ve been doing this for a while, we carry forward into HPE Pointnext Complete Care all those proven key elements that customers love and are already delivering value. That includes key elements like having an assigned team with named individuals that work with the customer. That’s the first thing we will do with an HPE Pointnext Complete Care customer. 

While we’re onboarding them, we enhance that by adding new roles into that assigned team and providing new profiling capabilities. We get to know that customer’s business, their key objectives and priorities, and then we build that into the plan and make sure anyone interacting with that customer has full visibility to what’s important to that specific customer.

For example, say I’m working with you, the customer, and you have a big customer event next week. We’re going to make sure that the entire HPE team working with you is ready to support you in that big event. We are going to make sure we mitigate all possible risks, and we’re going to have extra staff on hand to support you during that event. It’s important to have that level of detail of profiling. So, that assigned team is the first critical element.

In the broader scope, with HPEPointnext Complete Care, we’re expanding the products and software that we can cover in the customer framework agreement. That helps to enhance the incident management capabilities. When bad things do happen – because, at the end of the day, hardware will at some point fail, or somebody will make a mistake -- we make sure we can mitigate that. Whenever bad things occur, we’re enhancing the way that we manage those incidents. It makes for the best possible experience.

And, of course, we’re expanding the menu of new support capabilities; things like, broader services for open-source assets. We see many customers challenged with deploying the different varieties of open source products. And the move to automation and containers is accelerating the push to use of open source. Many of our customers are saying, “Boy, this is hard. It’s more complex than we imagined. It sounded, easy, fast, and cheap, but it’s none of those things.”

There are many benefits to moving to open source, but it is quite challenging. So that’s an area we’re going to help customers with. We have a lot of open source expertise within our company. We’re going to ramp that up with the launch of HPE Pointnext Complete Care to offer customers a single point of contact for all their open source tools.

And then, aligned with that, is our big focus on software in general. We see customers -- especially coming out of COVID – who had companies such as Microsoft, Oracle, and others open up access to free licenses. But now, coming out of the pandemic, those vendor companies rightfully are saying, “Well, gee, we need to monetize this now. We need to audit what software is being used by our customers.” And, of course, those customers in many cases are struggling to know what software is in their estate. They have huge estates, now with remote software to enable their global remote workforce, and in many cases that’s gotten out of control. We see customers who don’t know what software they have. Nor do they have a good handle on the associated costs, compliance issues, and security risks.

We help customers find all their software licenses. We show them via different dashboards what's being used. They can also see compliance risks, as well as where they're spending too much. They can even manage their software estate.

As a result, another HPE Pointnext Complete Care module we’re launching focuses on software asset management (SAM). We help customers find all their software licenses. We show them via different dashboards what’s being used. They can also see where they have security and compliance risks, as well as what they’re spending -- and perhaps where they’re spending too much. It shows how they could save money via recommendations in those dashboards. If they’d like, we can even do the management of their software estate thanks to the new SAM capabilities in HPE Pointnext Complete Care.

Those are some of the new exciting modules. It’s a long list, but those are a couple that jump to mind in terms of some of the new exciting capabilities we’re now introducing.

Gardner: As a global organization, HPE is helping each of these companies deal with these issues. That means what you learn in one part of world from one type of company can be applied to everybody else. There’s a vast amount of data gathered, and that can be applied and reapplied. It’s a very exciting time.

Gerry, let’s talk about your go-to-market strategy. This isn’t just an HPE-only entry point. What are you doing to make HPE Pointnext Complete Care available across a channel partner ecosystem?

Harness the power of partnerships

Nolan: HPE, like so many big companies, relies on our trusted partners around the world. We have an awesome network of partners, and we’re very excited with HPE Pointnext Complete Care to be opening that experience up to our channel partners.

Many partners have the desire to create an experience like HPE Pointnext Complete Care and deliver it to their end customers. But they may not have the full suite of capabilities. So, combining our capabilities with their capabilities, they all might be able to directly quote proposals to their end customers.

That would include HPE Pointnext Complete Care plus their own value. That’s a new capability available with HPE Pointnext Complete Care. We provide a new solutioning platform, which channel partners can directly access themselves. They can create proposals, basically on their own, and then bring in all the value of HPE plus their own value and be compensated to do that. So, it’s good for the customer, it’s good for the channel partner, and, of course, it’s jointly good for us as well. So, everybody wins.

Gardner: We’ve addressed the vast IT heterogeneity and how HPE Pointnext Complete Care will address that. But looking a little bit closer to home, within the HPE family of products, this has also given you an opportunity to unify around your HPE GreenLake as-a-service economics. You can put that umbrella over your product lines, such as Nimble storage, Cray for HPC, Ezmeral, and Aruba for networking and edge. So, tell us how HPE Pointnext Complete Care not only unifies a vendor ecosystem but unifies the HPE ecosystem and procurement models as well?

Nolan: One of the reasons we chose the name HPE Pointnext Complete Care is we are delivering that complete experience of bringing together a consistent, single point of support for the customer across all our products. I’m excited to say that, “Yes, we’re expanding the scope of HPE Pointnext Complete Care.”

So it includes all the products you just mentioned. Whether you have Nimble in your environment or HPE’s new container platform, called Ezmeral, or Cray, or even Aruba on the edge -- all of that can be included alongside your servers, storage, and the non-HPE everything you have under a single HPE Pointnext Complete Care contract.

And, of course, the other nice thing about HPE Pointnext Complete Care is HPE GreenLake, our as-a-service-offering model for those customers who want to buy their IT -- whether it’s on-premises or a colocation – and pay on an as-you-go basis, with a monthly bill for whatever they use. HPE GreenLake is the solution. In every HPE GreenLake engagement, at the heart of it, also has HPE Pointnext Complete Care. HPE Pointnext Complete Care carries the part that delivers the support and optimizes the performance of all that IT.

HPE GreenLake, we’re very excited to say, is called the “cloud that comes to you” because it delivers all the benefits of hybrid IT but with HPE Pointnext Complete Care in that expanded scope for support. We cover all the products you mentioned, all the elements of HPE GreenLake, and we’ll be adding to that as we learn and get more feedback from customers. We’re pretty excited.

Gardner: It’s near the end of summer 2021, and this is new to the market. But do you have any early adopters or beta customers that you can look to and say, “Yes, we’ve been describing this, but here’s how it’s working in practice?” Where is this being used first, and what are they getting for it?

A case in point takes flight

Nolan: A recent example comes to mind. A major aircraft manufacturer is struggling with a large, complex IT environment. By the nature of their business, it’s a very sensitive IT environment. They need to work with clusters and proven partners. We in 2021 signed a five-year engagement with that organization.

HPE is their sole IT support provider. We’re providing HPE Pointnext Complete Care coverage for their entire IT environment, including support for more than 20 different vendors. That means all types of hardware and software -- way beyond just the HPE products. It includes managing all their software licenses, a very large software estate across their environment. It includes helping them operate all the IT operations -- from planning through to support. We will take on the relationships with their other vendors, and we’ll provide that customer a single view, a single dashboard, and map to their key performance indicators (KPIs).

We're providing HPE Pointnext Complete Care coverage for their entire IT environment, including support for more than 20 different vendors. That means all types of hardware and software. It includes helping them operate all the IT -- from planning to support. We provide a single dashboard view and a map to the KPIs.

It’s an exciting engagement. And, of course, every customer will be measuring the value this way -- the idea of aligning with the customer on what KPIs are. Then we’ll constantly review and update those with the customer as we jointly make progress together.

This large deal is a good proof-point. It has most of the elements of HPE Pointnext Complete Care that I’ve been talking about. We are in discussions with many other customers in similar types of use case scenarios, where HPE Pointnext Complete Care provides that single point of contact across their complete IT estate. And, of course, we’re bringing to bear that complete suite of value.

Gardner: Is there a crawl, walk, run approach to HPE Pointnext Complete Care? How do you get started? How do you learn more?

Nolan: You can absolutely start with a small HPE Pointnext Complete Care contract, perhaps for one key part of your infrastructure or environment, and then grow from that over time. It’s totally flexible. I encourage anyone who believes that this might be an experience that would help them to engage through their authorized channel partner or directly with an HPE account manager representative.

There’s also a wealth of information on the HPE.com website in the HPE Pointnext Services area. We would love to come in and just discuss what’s going on in the customer’s environment. What are some of their challenges? What are some of their desired IT estate goals? And then just figure out, how we can help. And if we can help them and put together something that works for them.

Gardner: Gerry, what comes next? It sounds to me when you combine HPE GreenLake and HPE Pointnext Complete Care that we’re reverse engineering from the business outcomes back to what the IT requirements as services are. We’re revolutionizing IT. Even the economics of IT shift.

How does the advent of HPE Pointnext Complete Care work with some of these other trends to reinvent IT? Are we really looking at something that’s substantially different?

The IT solution revolution

Nolan: As vendors, we really need to continually step-up the game. As we’re trying to do here, we need to bring more value to customers who in turn are having to do that with their end customers. This spans the entire IT lifecycle – from helping customers with strategy, all the way through to operating and managing the IT estate.

It’s no longer good enough to just provide support, the sort of break-fix support. Instead, we must provide an end-to-end lifecycle experience for all IT, where we’re bringing in advice, help, insights, recommendations, and, of course, best-in-class support. For us, that includes continued investment in scaling up our people and building new solutions, as well as extending our AI and machine learning (ML) to bring about entirely new types of insights.

We can stop the bad things from happening before they happen. And technologies like augmented reality (AR) will help elevate the experience, allowing us to better support remote sites and every type of computing and business edge. We already support customers on ships, on oil rigs, and on the tops of mountains. There’s nowhere our support can’t go.



We’re constantly innovating and coming up with new solutions, which is why we’re making these investments. We see these as critical as the customers do. Business doesn’t stop, innovation doesn’t stop, and we’re going to stay ahead. That’s what we’re trying to do with HPE Pointnext Complete Care.

Gardner: Yes, you’re changing the relationship with your customers. It’s truly a partnership. When they succeed, you succeed, and vice-versa -- and you’ll need to work together to make that continue. It’s an exciting opportunity.

I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there. You’ve been exploring how today’s diversity of hybrid IT models and environments demand that IT services and support accommodate more digital variables than ever.

And we’ve learned how HPE Pointnext Services has developed solutions to satisfy this broad new definition of complete IT tech support. It’s a coverage that amounts to a “warm blanket” of support across the entire IT environment.

So, please join me in thanking our guest, Gerry Nolan, Director of Operational Services Portfolio at HPE Pointnext Services. Thank you so much, Gerry.

Nolan: Thank you, Dana. It’s been great.

Gardner: And a big thank you also to our audience for joining this sponsored BriefingsDirect Voice of Technology Services Innovation discussion. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of HPE Pointnext-supported discussions.

Thanks again for listening. Please pass this along to your IT community, and do come back next time. 

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise Pointnext Services.

Transcript of a discussion on how complexity and fast-changing dynamics of digital businesses are pushing enterprises to seek a complete and holistic way to support all their technology. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2021. All rights reserved.

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Monday, March 29, 2021

How HPE Pointnext Tech Care Changes the Game for Delivering Enhanced IT Solutions and Support


Transcript of a discussion on how HPE Pointnext Services has developed solutions to satisfy the new era of IT tech support expectations. 

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise Pointnext Services.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next BriefingsDirect Voice of Tech Services Innovation podcast series. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing discussion on how services and support for enterprise IT have entered a new era.

For IT technology service providers, the timing of the news couldn’t be better. Those now consuming tech support are demanding higher-order value -- such as higher worker productivity from hybrid services delivered across many more remote locations.

At the same time, the underlying technologies and intelligence to enhance traditional helpdesk-type support are blossoming to deliver proactive -- and even consultative -- enhancements.

Stay with us now as we examine how Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Pointnext Services has developed new solutions to satisfy this new era of higher IT tech support expectations.

We will now learn about HPE’s new generation of readily-at-hand IT expertise, augmented remote services, and ongoing product-use guidance that together propel businesses to exploit their digital domains -- better than ever.

Here to share the Pointnext vision for the future of advanced IT operational services is Gerry Nolan, Director of Operational Services Portfolio, at HPE Pointnext Services. Welcome, Gerry.


Gerry Nolan:
Hi, Dana. Great to be here. Thank you.

Gardner: We are also here with Rob Brothers, Program Vice President, Datacenter and Support Services, at IDC. Welcome, Rob.

Rob Brothers: Hi, Dana. Thank you very much for having me on the show.

Gardner: Rob, what are enterprise IT leaders and their consumers demanding of tech support in early 2021? How are their expectations different from just a year or two ago?

IT evolves from fix-it to forward-thinking

Brothers: It’s a great question, Dana. I want to jump back a little bit further than just a year or so ago. That’s because support has really evolved so much over the past five, six, or seven years.

Brothers
If you think about product support and support in general back in the day, it was just that. It was an add-on. It was great for fix services. It was about being able to place a phone call to get something fixed.

But that evolved over the past few years due to the fact that we have more intelligent devices and customers are looking for more proactive, predictive capabilities, with direct access to experts and technicians. And now that all has taken a fast-track trajectory during the pandemic as we talk about digital transformation.

During COVID-19, customers need new ways to work with tech-support organizations. They need even more technical assistance. So, we see that a plethora of secure, remote-support capabilities have come out. We see more connected devices. We see that customers look for expertise over the phone -- as well as via chat or via augmented reality. Whatever the channel, we see a trajectory and growth that has spurred on a lot of innovation -- and not just the innovation itself, but the consumption of that innovation.

Those are a couple of the big differences I’ve seen in just the past couple of years. It’s about the need for newer support models, and a different way of receiving support. It’s also about using a lot of the new, proactive, and predictive capabilities built inside of these newer systems -- and really getting connected back to the vendor.

Those enterprises that connect back to their vendors are getting that improved experience and can then therefore pass that better experience to their customers. That's the important part of the whole equation.

Those enterprises that connect back to their vendors are getting that improved experience and can then therefore pass that better experience to their customers. That’s the important part of the whole equation -- making sure that better IT experiences translate to those enterprise customers. It’s a very interesting time.

Gardner: I sense this is also about more collective knowledge. When we can gather and share how IT systems are operating, it just builds on itself. And now we have the tools in place to connect and collaborate better. So this is an auspicious time -- just as the demand for these services has skyrocketed.

Brothers: Yes, without a doubt. I find the increased use of augmented reality (AR) to deliver support extremely interesting, too, and a great use case during a pandemic.

If you can’t send an engineer to a facility in-person, maybe you can give that engineer access to the IT department using Google Glass or some other remote-access technology. Maybe you can walk them through something that they may not have been able to do otherwise. With all of the data and information the vendor collects, they can more easily walk them through more issues. So that’s just one really cool use case during this pandemic.

Gardner: Gerry, do you agree that there’s been auspicious timing when it comes to the need for these innovative support services and the capability to deliver them technically?

Pandemic accelerates remote services

Nolan: Yes, there’s no question. I totally agree with Rob. We saw a massive spike with the pandemic in terms of driving to remote access. We already had significant remote capabilities, but many of our customers all of a sudden have a huge remote workforce that they have to deal with.

Nolan
They have to keep their IT running with minimal on-site presence, and so you have to start quickly innovating and delivering things such as AR and virtual reality (VR), which is what we did. We already have that solution.

But it’s amazing how something like a pandemic can elevate that use to our thousands and thousands of technical engineers around the world who are now using that technology and solution to virtually join customer sites and help them triage, diagnose, and even do installations. It’s allowing them to keep their systems and their businesses running during a very tough period.

Another insight is we’ve seen customers struggling, even before the pandemic, with having enough technical personnel bandwidth. You know, how they need more people resources and skills as more new technologies hit the streets.

To Rob’s point, it’s difficult for customers to keep pace with the speed of change in IT. There’s more hunger for partners who can go deep on expertise across a wide plethora of technologies. So, there’s a variety of new support activities going on.

Brothers: Yes, around those technical capabilities, one of the biggest things I hear from enterprises is just trying to find that talent pool. You need to get employees to do some of the technical pieces of the equation on a lot of these new IT assets. And they’re just not out there, right?

They need programmers and big data data scientists. Getting folks to come in to assist on that level is more and more difficult. Hence, working with the vendor for a lot of these needs and that technical expertise really comes in handy now.

Gardner: Right, when you can outsource -- people do outsource. That’s been a trend for 10 or 15 years now.

What are the challenges enterprises -- as the IT vendors and providers -- have in closing that skills gap?

DX demands collaboration

Brothers: I actually did a big study around digital transformation. One of the big issues I’ve seen within enterprises is a lot of siloed structures. The networking team is not talking to the storage team, or not talking to the server team, and protecting their turf.

As an alternative, you can have the vendor come in and say, “Look, we can do this for you in a simpler fashion. We can do it a little bit faster, too, and we can keep downtime out of your environment.”

But trying to get the enterprise convinced [on the outsourcing] can sometimes be tricky and difficult. So I see that as one of the inhibitors to getting some of these great tech services that the vendors have into these environments.

A lot of these legacy systems are mixed in with the newer systems. This is where you see a struggle within enterprises. It's still the stovepipe silos in enterprises that can make transitions very difficult.

A second big challenge I see is around the big, legacy IT environments. This goes back to that connectedness piece I talked about. A lot of these legacy systems are mixed in with the newer systems. This is where you see a struggle within enterprises. They are asking, “Okay, well, how do I support this older equipment and still migrate to this new platform that I want to do a lot of cloud-based computing with and become more operationally efficient?” The vendors can assist with that, but it’s still the stovepipe silos you sometimes see in enterprises that can make transitions very difficult.

Gardner: Right. The fact is we have hybrid everything, and now we have to adjust our support and services to that as well.

Gerry, around these challenges, it seems we also have some older thinking around how you buy these tech services. Perhaps it has been through a warranty or a bolt-on support plan. Do we need to change the way we think about acquiring these services?

Customer experience choice

Nolan: Yes, customers are all about experiences these days. Think about pretty much every part of your life -- whether you’re going to the bank, booking a vacation, or even buying an electric car. They’ve totally transformed the experience in each of those areas.

IT is no different. Customers are trying to move beyond, as Rob was saying, that legacy IT thinking. Even if it’s contacting a support provider for a break-fix issue, they want the solution to come with an end-to-end experience that’s compelling, engaging, and in a way that they don’t need to think about all the various bits and pieces. The fewer decisions a customer has to make and the more they can just aim for a particular outcome, the more successful we’re going to be.

Brothers: Yes, when a customer invested $1 million in a solution set, the old mindset was that after three or four years it would be retired and they would buy a new one -- but that’s completely changed.

Now, you’re looking at this technology for a longer term within your environment. You want to make sure you’re getting all the value out of it, so that support experience becomes extremely important. What does the system look like from a performance perspective? Did I get the full dollar value out of it?


That kind of experience is not just between the vendor and with my own internal IT department, but also in how that experience correlates out to my end-user customer. It becomes about bringing that whole experience circle around. It’s really about the experience for everybody in the environment -- not just for the vendor and not just for the enterprise. But it’s for the enterprise’s customers.
 

Gardner: Rob, I think it behooves the seller of the IT goods if they’ve moved from a CapEx to an OpEx model so that they can make those services as valuable as possible and therefore also apply the right and best level of support over time. It locks the customer in on a value basis, rather than a physical basis.

Brothers: Yes, that’s one great mindset change I’ve seen over the past five years. I did a study about six years ago, and I asked customers how they bought support. Overwhelmingly they said they just bought a blanket support contract. It was the same contract for all of the assets within the environment.

But just recently, in the past couple of years, that’s completely changed. They are now looking at the workloads. They’re looking at the systems that run those workloads and making better decisions as to the best type of support contract on that system. Now they can buy that in an OpEx- or CapEx-type manner, versus that blanket contract they used to put on it.


It’s really great to see how customers have evolved to look at their environments and say, “I need different types of support on the different assets I have, and which provide me different experiences.” That’s been a major change in just the past couple of years.

Nolan: We’re also seeing customers seek the capability to evolve and move from one support model to another. You might have a customer environment where they have some legacy products where they need help. And they’re implementing some new technologies and new solutions, and they’re developing new apps.

It’s really helpful for that customer if they can work with a single vendor -- even if they have multiple, different IT models. That way they can get support for their legacy, deploy new on-premises technologies, and integrate that together with their legacy. And then, of course, having that consumption-as-a-service model that Rob just talked about, they also have a nice easy way of transitioning workloads over to hybrid models where appropriate.

I think that’s a big benefit, and it’s what the customers seem to be looking for more and more these days.

Gardner: Gerry, what’s the vision now behind HPE to deliver on that? What’s Pointnext Services doing to provide a new generation of tech support that accommodates these new and often hybrid environments?

Tech Care’s five steps toward support

Nolan: We’re very excited to launch a new support experience called HPE Pointnext  Tech Care. It’s all about delivering on much of what’s just been said in terms of moving beyond a product break-fix experience to helping customers get the most out of that product -- all the way from purchasing through its lifecycle to end-of-life.

Our main goal for HPE Pointnext Tech Care is to help customers maximize and expose all the value from that product. We’re going to do that with HPE Pointnext Tech Care through five key elements.

Products are going to be embedded with a support experience called HPE Pointnext Tech Care. It's a very simple experience. It has some choices on the SLA side, but it's going to dramatically simplify the buying and owing experience at HPE.

The first is to make it a very simple experience. Today, we have four different choices when you’re buying a product as to which experience you want to go with. Now with HPE Pointnext, products are going to be sold embedded with a support experience called HPE Pointnext Tech Care. It’s a very simple experience. It has some choices on the service-level-agreement (SLA) side, but it’s going to dramatically simplify the buying and owning experience for our HPE customers.

The second aspect is the digital-transformation component that we see everywhere in life. That means we’re embedding a lot of data telemetry into the products. We have a product called HPE InfoSight that’s now embedded in our technology being deployed.

InfoSight collects all that data and sends it back to the mother ship, which allows our support experts to gain all of those insights and provide help with the customer in mitigating, predicting, planning capacity, and helping to keep that system running and optimized at all times. So, that’s one element of the digital component.

The other aspect is a very rich support portal, a customer engagement platform. We’ve already redone our support center on hpe.com and customers will see it’s completely changed. It has a new look and feel. Over the coming quarters, there will be more and more new capabilities and functionality added. Customers will be able to see dashboards, personalized views of their environments, and their products. They’ll get omni-channel access to our experts, which is the third element we are providing.

We have all this great expertise. Traditionally, you would connect with them over the telephone. But going forward, you’re going to have the capability, as Rob mentioned, for customers to do chat. They may also want to watch videos of the experts. They may want to talk to their peers. So we have a moderated forum area where customers can communicate with each other and with our experts. There’s also a whole plethora of white papers and Tech Tip videos. It’s a very rich environment.

Then the fourth HPE Pointnext Tech Care element touches on a key trend that Rob mentioned, which goes beyond break-fix. With HPE Pointnext Tech Care, you’ll have the capability to communicate with experts beyond just talking about a broken part of your system. This will allow you to contact us and talk about things such as using the product, or capacity planning, or configuration information that you may have questions about. This general tech guidance feature of HPE Pointnext Tech Care, we believe, is going to be very exciting for customers, and they’re going to really benefit from it.

And lastly, the fifth component is about a broader spectrum of full lifecycle help that our customers want. They don’t just want a support experience around buying the product, they want it all the way through its lifetime. The customer may need help with migration, for example, or they may need help with performance, training their people, security, and maybe even retiring or sanitizing that asset. 

With HPE Pointnext Tech Care, they will have a nice, easy mechanism where you have a very robust, warm-blanket-type of support that comes with the product and can easily be augmented with other menu choices. We’re very excited about launch of HPE Pointnext Tech Care and it comes with those five key elements. It’s going to transform the support experience and help customers get the most from their HPE products.

Gardner: Rob, how much of a departure do you sense the HPE Pointnext Tech Care approach is from earlier HPE offerings, such as HPE Foundation Care? Is this a sea change or a moderate change? How big of a deal is this?

Proactive, predictive capabilities

Brothers: In my opinion, it’s a pretty significant change. You’re going to get proactive, predictive capabilities at the base level of the HPE Pointnext Tech Care service that a lot of other vendors charge a real premium for.

I can’t stress enough how important it is for those proactive, predictive capabilities to come with environments. A survey that I did not long ago supported a cost-downtime study. In that study, customers saw approximately 700 or so hours of downtime per year across their environments. These are servers, storage, networking, and security, and take human error into account. If customers enabled proactive, predictive capabilities, they saw approximately 200 hours of saved downtime. That’s because of what those corrective, predictive capabilities can do at that base layer. They allow you to do the one big thing that prevents downtime -- and that's patch management and patch planning.

Now, those technical experts that Gerry talked about can access all of this beautiful, feature-rich information and data. They can feed it back to the customer and say, “Look, here’s how your environment looks. Here’s where we see some areas that you can make improvements, and here's a patch plan that you can put in place.”

Now technical experts can access all of this beautiful, feature-rich information and data. They can feed it back to the customer to make improvements. That's precious information and data.

Then all of the data comes back from enterprises, saying, “If I do a better job of that patching and patch planning that just saves a copious amount of unplanned and planned downtime out of my environment because I now do a better job of that.” That’s precious information and data.

That’s the big fundamental change. They’re showing the real value to the customer so they don’t have to buy some of those premium levels. They can get that kind of value in the base level, which is extremely important and provides that higher-order experience to end-user customers. So I do think that’s a huge fundamental shift, and definitely a new value for the customers.

Gardner: Rob, correct me if I’m wrong, but having this level of proactive, baked-in-from-the-start support comes at an auspicious time, too, because people are also trying to do more automation with their security operations. It seems to me that we’re dovetailing the right approaches for patching and proactive maintenance along with what’s needed for security. So, there’s a security benefit here as well?

Brothers: Oh, massive. Especially if you look at this day-and-age with a lot of the security breaches we just had just over the past year due to new security remote access to a lot of systems. Yes, it definitely plays a major factor in how enterprises should be thinking about how they’re patching and patch planning.

Gardner: Gerry, just to pull on that thread again about data and knowledge sharing, the more you get the relationship that you’re describing with HPE Pointnext Tech Care -- the more back and forth of the data and learning what the systems are doing -- and you have a virtuous cycle. Tell us how the machine learning (ML) and data gathering works in aggregate and why that’s an auspicious virtuous cycle.

Nolan: That’s an excellent question and, of course, you’re spot-on. The combination is of the telemetry built into the actual products through HPE InfoSight, our back-end experts, and the detailed knowledge management processes. We also have our experts who are watching, listening, and talking to customers as they deal with issues.

That means you have two things going on. You have the software learning over time and we have rules being built in there so that when it spots an issue it can go and look for all the other similar environments and then help those customers mitigate and predict ahead of time.


Secondly our experts can engage better because they’re also dealing with and seeing various challenges happening around the world in various environments. The combined knowledge management process means we’re constantly building more and more content, more and more knowledge, and we’re immediately making that available through the new digital customer platforms.

That means that customers will immediately get the benefit of all of this knowledge. It might be a Tech Tip video. It might be a white paper. It might be an item or an article in a moderated forum. There’s this rich back-and-forth between what’s available in the portal and what’s available in the knowledge that the software will build over time. And all of this just comes to bear in a richer experience for the customer, where they can help either self-solve or self-serve. But if they want to engage with our experts, they’re available in multiple different channels and in multiple different ways.

Gardner: Rob, another area where 2+2=5 is when we can take those ML and data-driven insights that Gerry described across a larger addressable market of installed devices. And then, we can augment that with MyRoom-type technologies and the VR and AR capabilities that you described earlier.

What’s the new sum value when we can combine these insights with the capability to then deliver the knowledge remotely and richly?

Autonomous IT reduces human error

Brothers: That’s a really great point. The whole idea is to attain what we call autonomous IT. That means to have IT systems that are more on the self-repair side, and that have product pieces shipped prior to things going wrong.

One of the biggest and most-costly pieces of downtime is from human error. If we can pull the human touch and human interaction out of the IT environment, we save each company hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. That’s what all this data and information will provide to the IT vendors. They can then say, “Look, let’s take the human interactions out of it. We know that’s one of the most-costly sides of the equation.”

If we can pull the human touch and interaction out of the IT environment we save money and reduce human error. We can optimize systems. It gets to the point where we're relying on the intelligence of the systems to do more. That's the direction we're heading in.

If we can do that in an autonomous fashion -- where we’re optimizing systems on a regular basis, equipment is being shipped to the facility prior to anything breaking, we can schedule any downtime during quiet times, and make sure that workloads are moved properly -- then that’s the endgame. It gets to the point where the human factor gets more removed and we’re relying more on the intelligence of the systems to do more.

That’s definitely the direction we’re moving in, and what we’re seeing here is definitely heading in that direction.

Gardner: Yes, and in that case, you’re not necessarily buying IT support, your buying IT insurance.

Brothers: Yes, exactly. That gets back to the consumption models. HPE is one of the leaders in that space with HPE GreenLake. They were one of the pioneers to come up with a solution such as that, which takes the whole IT burden off of IT’s plate and puts it back on the vendor.

Nolan: We have a term for that concept that one of my colleagues uses. They call it invisible IT. That’s really what a lot of customers are looking for. As Rob said, we’re still some ways from that. But it’s a noble goal, and we’re all in to try and achieve it.

Gardner: So we know what the end-goal is, but we’re still in the progression to it. But in the meantime, it’s important to demonstrate to people value and return on investment (ROI).

Do we have any HPE Pointnext Tech Care examples, Gerry? Rob already mentioned a few of his studies that show dramatic improvements. But do we have use cases and/or early-adoption patterns? How do we measure when you do this well and you get?

Benefits already abound

Nolan: There are a ton of benefits. For example, we already have extensive Tech Tip video libraries. We have chat implemented. We have the moderated forums up and running. We have lots of different elements of the experience already live in certain product areas, especially in storage.

Of course, many HPE products are already connected through HPE InfoSight or other tools, which means those systems are being monitored on a 24 x 7 basis. The software already monitors, predicts, and mitigates issues before they occur, as well as provides all sorts of insights and recommendations. This allows both the customer and our support experts to engage and take remediation action before anything bad happens. 

Customers seem to love this more-rich experience approach. Yes, there’s a lot more data and a lot more insights. But to have those experts on-hand, to be able to gain or build an action plan from all of that data, is really important.

Now, in terms of some of the benefits that we’re seeing in the storage space, those customers that are connected are seeing 73 percent fewer trouble tickets and 69 percent faster time-to-resolution. To date, since InfoSight was first deployed in that storage environment alone, we’ve measured about 1.5 million hours of saved productivity time.

So there are real benefits when you combine being connected with ML tools such as InfoSight. When the rich value available in HPE Pointnext Tech Care comes together, it further reduces downtime, improves performance, and helps reach the end-goal that Rob talked about, the autonomous IT or invisible IT. 

Gardner: Rob, we started our conversation about what’s changed in tech support. What’s changed when it comes to the key performance indicators (KPIs) for evaluating tech support and services?

Brothers: The big, new KPIs that we’re seeing do not just evaluate the experience that the enterprise has with the IT vendors. Although that’s obviously extremely important, it’s also about how does that correlate to the experiences my end-users are receiving?


You’re beginning to see those measurements come to the fore. An enterprise has its own SLAs and KPIs with its end-users. How is that matching to the KPIs and SLAs I have back to my IT vendors? You’re beginning to see those merge and come together. You’re beginning to see new matrices put in place where you can evaluate the vendor through how well you’re delivering user experiences to your own end-users.

It takes a bit of time and energy to align that because it’s a fairly complex measurement to put in place. But we’re beginning to see that from enterprises, to seek that level of value from the vendors. And the vendors are stepping up, right? They’re beginning to show these dashboards back to the enterprise that say, “Hey, here’s the SLA, here are the KPIs, here are the performance matrices that we’re collecting and that should correlate fairly well to what you’re providing to your end-user customers.”

Gardner: Gerry, if we properly align these values, it better fits with digital transformation because people have to perceive the underlying digital technologies as an enabler, not as a hurdle. Is HPE Pointnext Tech Care an essential part of digital transformation when we think about that change of perception?

Incident management transforms

Nolan: It totally is. One of our early Pointnext customers is a large, US retailer. They’ve gone through a situation where they had a bunch of technology. Each one had its own individual support contract. And they’ve moved to a more centralized and simpler approach where they have one support experience, which we actually deliver across each of their different products -- and they’re seeing huge benefits.

They’ve gone from firefighting and having their small IT team predominantly focused on dealing with issues and support calls regarding hardware- and update-type issues and all of a sudden, they were measuring themselves on incidents -- how many incidents -- and they were trying to keep that at a manageable level.

One large, US retailer has moved to a more centralized and simpler approach where they have one support experience -- and they're seeing huge benefits.

Well, now, they’ve totally changed. The incidents have almost disappeared -- and now they’re focused on innovation. How fast can they get new applications to their business? How fast can they get new projects to market in support of the business?

They’re just one customer who has gone through this transformation where they’re using all of the things we just talked about and it’s delivering significant benefits to them and to their IT group. And the IT group, in turn, are now heroes to their business partners around the US.

Gardner: I want to close with some insights into how organization should prepare themselves. Rob, if you want to gain this new level of capability across your IT organization, you want the consumers of IT in your enterprise to look to IT for solutions and innovation, what should you be thinking about now? What should you put in place to take advantage of the offerings that organizations such as HPE are providing with HPE Pointnext Tech Care?

Evaluating vendor experiences

Brothers: It all starts with the deployment process. When you’re looking and evaluating vendors, it’s not just, “Hey, how is the product? Is the product going to perform and do its task?”

Some 99 percent of the time, the stand-alone IT system you’re procuring is going to solve the issue you’re looking to solve. The key is how well is that vendor going to get that system up and running in your environment, connected to everything it needs to be connected to, and then supports it optimizes it for the long run.

It’s really more about that life cycle experience. So, as an enterprise, you need to think differently on how you want to engage with your IT vendor. You need to think about all the different performance KPIs, and match that back to your end-user customer.

The thought process of evaluating vendors, in my opinion, is shifting. It’s more about the type of experience I get with this vendor versus the product and its job. That’s one of the big transitional phases I’m seeing right now. Enterprises are thinking about more the experience they have with their partners, more so then if the product is doing the job. 

Gardner: Gerry, what do you recommend people do in order to get prepared to take advantage of such offerings as HPE Pointnext Tech Care?

Nolan: Following on from what Rob said, customers can already decide what experience they would like. HPE Pointnext Tech Care will be the embedded support experience that comes with their HPE products. It’s going to be very easy to buy because it’s going to be right there embedded with the product when the product is being configured and when the quote is being put together.

HPE Pointnext Tech Care is a very simple, easy, and fully integrated experience. They’re buying a full product experience, not a product -- and then choose their support experience on the side. If they want something broader than just a product experience -- what I call the warm blanket around their whole enterprise environment -- we have another experience called Datacenter Care that provides that.

We also have other experiences. We can, for example, manage the environment for them using our management capabilities. And then, of course, we have our HPE GreenLake as-a-service on-premises experience. We’ve designed each of these experiences so they can totally live together and work together. You can also move and evolve from one to the other. You can buy products that come with HPE Pointnext Tech Care and then easily move to a broader Datacenter Care to cover the whole environment.

We can take on and manage some of that environment and then we can transition workloads to the as-a-service model. We’re trying to make it as easy and as fast as possible for customers to onboard through any and all of these experiences.

Gardner: I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there. We’ve been exploring how today’s consumers of IT tech support are demanding higher-order value to get the most from their hybrid systems and services.

And we’ve learned how HPE Pointnext Services has matched these new IT tech support expectations with a new generation of readily at-hand expertise, augmented on-location services, and ongoing guidance that will propel businesses to exploit their digital domains better than ever. 


Please join me in thanking our guests, Gerry Nolan, Director of Operational Services Portfolio at HPE Pointnext Services. Thank you very much, Gerry.

Nolan: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: And we’ve also been here with Rob Brothers, Program Vice President, Datacenter and Support Services, at IDC. Thank you so much, Rob.

Brothers: Thanks, Dana. Thanks, Gerry.

Gardner: And a big thank you as well to our audience for joining us for this sponsored BriefingsDirect Voice of Tech Services Innovation discussion. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of HPE-supported discussions.

Thanks again for listening. Please pass this along to your IT community, and do come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise Pointnext Services.

Transcript of a discussion on how HPE Pointnext Services has developed solutions to satisfy the new era of IT tech support expectations. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2021. All rights reserved.

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