How Digital Transformation Navigates Disruption to Chart a Better Course to the New Normal

A discussion on how HPE Pointnext Services advises organizations on using digital transformation to take advantage of new and emerging market opportunities.

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

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the BriefingsDirect Voice of Innovation podcast series.

Gardner

I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this timely discussion on architecting businesses for managing ongoing disruption.

As enterprises move past crisis mode in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, they require a systemic capability to better manage shifting market trends.

Stay with us now as we examine how Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Pointnext Services advises organizations on using digital transformation to take advantage of new and emerging opportunities.

Here to share the Pointnext view on transforming businesses to effectively innovate in the new era of pervasive digital business, is Craig Partridge, Senior Director Worldwide, Digital Advisory and Transformation Practice Lead, at HPE Pointnext Services. Welcome back, Craig.

Craig Partridge: Hey, Dana. Good to speak with you again.

Gardner: Craig, how has the response to the pandemic accelerated the need for comprehensive digital transformation?

Disruption demands digital solutions 

Partridge: We speak to a lot of customers around the world. And the one thing that we are picking up very commonly is a little bit counter-intuitive.

At the beginning of the pandemic -- in fact, at the beginning of any major disruption -- there is a sense that companies will put the brakes on and slow everything down. And that happened as we went through this initial period. Preserving cash and liquidity kicked in and a minimum viable operating model emerged. People were reluctant to invest.

Partridge

But as they now begin to see the shifting landscape in industries, we are beginning to see a recognition that those pivoting out of these disruptive moments the quickest -- with sustained, long-term viability built behind how they accelerate -- those organizations are the ones driving new experiences and new insights. They are pushing hard on the digital agenda. In other words, digitally active companies seem to be the ones pivoting quicker out of these disruptions -- and coming out stronger as well.

So although there was an initial pause as people pivoted to the new normal, we are seeing now acceleration of initiatives or projects, underpinned by technology, that are fundamentally about reshaping the customer experience. If you can do that through digital engagement models, you can continue to drive revenue and customer loyalty because you are executing those valued transactions through digital platforms.

Gardner: Has the pandemic and response made digital transformation more attractive? If you have to do more business digitally, if your consumers and your supply chain have become more digital, is this a larger opportunity?

Partridge: Yes, it’s not only more attractive – it’s more essential. That’s what we are learning.

A good example here in the UK, where I am based, is that big retailers have traditionally been deeply into the brick world experience of walking into a retail store or supermarket, those kinds of big, physical spaces. They figured out during this period of disruption that the only way to continue to drive revenue and take orders was on digital platforms. Well, guess what? Those digital platforms were only scaled and sized for a certain kind of demand, and that demand was based on a pre-pandemic normal.

This transformation is not just an attractive thing to do. For many organizations pivoting hard to digital engagement and digital revenue streams is their new normal. That's what they have to focus on -- not just to survive but for beyond that.

Now, they have to double or treble the capacity of their transactions across those digital platforms. They are having to increase massively their capability to not only buy online, but to get deliveries out to those customers as well.

So this transformation is not just an attractive thing to do. For many organizations pivoting hard to digital engagement and digital revenue streams is their new normal. That’s what they have to focus on -- and not just to survive but for beyond that. It’s the direction to their new normal as well.

Gardner: It certainly seems that the behavior patterns of consumers, as well as employees, have changed for the longer term when it comes to things like working at home, using virtual collaboration, bypassing movie theaters for online releases, virtual museums, and so forth.

For those organizations that now have to cater to those online issues and factor in the support of their employees online, it seems to me that this shift in user behavior has accelerated what was already under way. Do companies therefore need to pick up the pace of what they are doing for their own internal digital transformation, recognizing that the behaviors in the market have shifted so dramatically?

Safety first 

Partridge: Yes, in the past digital transformation focused on the customer experience, the digital engagement channel, and building out that experience. You can relate that in large parts to the shift toward e-commerce. But increasingly people are aware of the need to integrate information about the physical space as well. And if this pandemic taught us anything, it’s that they need to not only create great experiences – they must create safe, great experiences.

What does that mean? I need to understand about my physical space so I can augment my service offerings in a way that’s safe. We are looking at scenarios where using video recognition and artificial intelligence (AI) will begin to work out whether that space being used safely. Are there measurements we can put in place to protect people better? Are people keeping certain social distancing rules?

All of that is triggering the next wave of customer experience, which isn’t just the online digital platform and digital interactions, but -- as we get back out into the world and as we start to occupy those spaces again -- how do I use the insight about the physical space to augment that experience and make sure that we can emerge safer, better, and enjoy those digital experiences in a way that’s also physically safe.

Beyond just the digital transactions side, now it’s much more about starting to address the movement that was already long on the way -- the digitization of the physical world and how that plays into making these experiences more beneficial.

Gardner: So if the move to digitally transform your organization is an imperative, if those who did it earlier have an advantage, if those who haven’t done it want to do it more rapidly -- what holds organizations back? What is it about legacy IT architectures that are perhaps a handicap?

Pivoting from the cloud 

Partridge: It’s a great question because when I talk to customers about moving into the digital era, that triggers the question, “Well, what was there before this digital era?” And we might argue it was the cloud era that preceded it.

Now, don’t get me wrong. These aren’t sequential. I’m not saying that the cloud era is over and the digital era has replaced it. As you know, these are waves. And they rise on top of each other. But organizations that are able to go fast and accelerate on the digital agenda are often the same organizations.

The biggest constraint we see as organizations try to stress-test their digital age adoption is to see if they actually have agility in the back end. Are the systems set up to be able to scale on-demand as they start to pivot toward digital channels to engage their customers? Does a recalibration of the supply chain mean applications and data are placed in the right part of on- or off-premises cloud architecture supply chains?

The biggest constraint we see as organizations try to stress-test their digital age adoption is to see if they actually have agility in the back end. Are the systems set up to be able to scale on-demand as they pivot to digital channels to engage with their customers?

If you haven’t gone through a modernization agenda, if you haven’t tackled that core innovation issue, if you haven’t embraced cloud architectures, cloud-scale, and software-defined – and, increasingly, by the way, the shift to things like containerization, microservices, and decomposing big monolithic applications into manageable chunks that are application programming interface

(API)-connected -- if you haven’t gone through that cloud-enabled exploration prior to the digital era, well, it looks like you still have some work to do before you can get the gains that some of those other modern organizations are now able to express.

There’s another constraint, which is really key. For most of the customers we speak to, it tends to be in and around the operating model. In a lot of conversations that I have with customers, they over-invested in technology. They are on every cloud platform available. They are using every kind of digital technology to gain a level of competitive advantage.

Yet, at the heart of any organization are the people. It’s the culture of the people and the innovation of your people that really makes the difference. So, not least of all, the supply chain agility, right in the heart of this conversation. It is the fundamental operating model -- not just of IT, but the operating model of the entire organization.

So have they unticked their value chain? Have they looked at the key activities? Have they thought when they implement new technology, and how that might replace or augment activities? And what does that mean to the staff? Can you bring them with you, and have you empowered them? Have you re-skilled them along the way? Have you driven those cultural change programs to force that digital-first mindset, which is really the key to success in all of this?

Gardner: So many interdependencies, so much complexity, frankly, when we’re thinking about transacting across the external edge to cloud, to consumer, and to data center. And we’re talking about business processes that need to extend into new supply chains or new markets.

Given that complexity, tell us how to progress beyond understanding how difficult this all can be and to adopt proven ways that actually work.

Universal model has the edge 

Partridge: For everything that we’ve talked about, we have figured out that there is a universal model that organizations can use to methodologically go off into this space.

We found out that organizations are very quickly pivoting to exploring their digital edge. I think the digital agenda is an edge-in conversation. Again, I think that marks it out from the preceding cloud era, which was much more about core-out. That was get scale, efficiency, and cost optimization out of service delivery models in-place. But that was a very core-out conversation. When you think digital, you have to begin to think about the use case of where value is created or exchanged. And, that’s an edge-in conversation.

And we managed to find that there are two journeys behind that discussion. The first one is about deciding to whom you are looking to deliver that digital experience. So when you think about digital engagement, really caring passionately about who the beneficiary persona is behind that experience. You need to describe that person in terms of what’s their day-in-the-life. What pains do they face today? What gains could you develop that could deliver better outcomes for them? How can you walk in their shoes, and how do you describe that?

We found that is a key journey, typically led by kind of chief digital officer-type character who is responsible for driving new digital engagement with customers. If the persona is external to the customer, if it’s a revenue-generating persona, we might think of revenue as the essential key performance indicator (KPI). But you can apply similar techniques to drive internal personas’ productivity. So productivity becomes the KPI.

That journey is inspired by initiatives that are trying to use digital to connect to people in new, innovative, and differentiated ways. And you’ll find different stakeholders behind that journey.

And we found another journey, which is reshaping the edge. And that’s much more about using technology to digitize the physical world. So let’s hear about the experience, about business efficiency and effectiveness at the edge -- and using the insights of instrumenting and digitizing the physical world to give you a sense of how that space is being used. How is my manufacturing floor performing? The KPI is overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) in the manufacturing space and it becomes key. Behind this journey you’ll see big Industry 4.0-type and Internet of Things (IoT)-type of initiatives under way.

If organizations are able to stitch these two journeys together -- rather than treat them as siloed sandpits for innovation – and if they can connect them together, they tend to get compound benefits.

You asked about where the constraint comes in. As we said, it is about getting agility into the supply chain. And again, we’ve actually found that there are two connected journeys, but with very different stakeholders behind them, which drive that agenda.

We have a journey, too, that describes a core renovation agenda that will occupy 70 to 80 percent of every IT budget every year. It’s the constant need to challenge the price performance of legacy environments and constantly optimize and move the workloads and data into the right part of the supply chain for strategic advantage.

That is coupled with yet another journey, that of the cloud-enabled constraint and that’s very much developer-led more than it is led by IT. IT is typically holding the legacy footprint, the technical debt footprint, but the developer is out there looking to exploit cloud-native architectures to write the next wave of applications and experiences. And they are just as impactful when it comes to equipping the organization with the cloud scale that’s necessary to mine those opportunities on the edge.

So, there is a balance in this equation, to your point. There is innovation at the edge, very much line of business-driven, very much about business efficiency and effectiveness, or revenue and productivity, the real tangible dollar value outcomes. And on the other side, it’s more about agility and the supply chain. It’s getting that balance right so that I have my agility and that allows me to go and explore the world digitally at the edge.

So they sort of overlap. And the implication there is that there are three core enablers and they are true no matter which of the big four agenda items customers are trying to drive through their initiative programs.

In digital, data is everything 

Two of those enablers very much relate to data. Again, Dana, I know in the digital era data is everything. It is the glue that holds this new digital engagement model together. In there we found two key enablers that constantly come up, no matter which agenda you are driving.

The first one is surely you need intelligence from that data; data for its own sake is of no use, it’s about getting intelligence from that dataset. And that’s not just to make better decisions, but actually to innovate, to create differentiated value propositions in your market. That’s really the key agenda behind that intelligence enabler.

And the second thing, because we are dealing with data, is a huge impact and emphasis on being trusted with that data. And that doesn’t just mean being compliant to regulatory standards or having the right kind of resiliency and cybersecurity approach, it means going beyond that.

You need to gain intelligence from the data; data for its own sake is of no use, it's about getting intelligence for the datasets. And that's not just to make better decisions, it's to innovate and create differentiated value propositions in your market.

In this digitally enabled world, we want to trust brands with our data because often that data is now extremely personal. So beyond just General Data Protection Regulation

(GDPR) compliance, trust here means, “Am I being ethical? Am I being transparent about how I use that data?” We all saw the Cambridge Analytica-type of impact and what happens when you are not transparent and you are not ethical about how you use data.

Now, one thing we haven’t touched on and I will just throw it up as a bit of context, Dana. There is a consideration, a kind of global consideration behind all of this agenda and that’s the shift toward everything-as-a-service (EaaS).

A couple of key attributes of that consideration includes the most obvious one; it’s the financial flexibility one. For sure, as you reassemble your supply chain -- as you continue to press on that cloud-enabled side of the map -- what you are paying, what you consume, and doing that in a strategic way helps get the right mix in that supply chain, and paying only for that as you consume, is kind of obvious.

But I think the more important thing to understand is that our customers are being equally innovative at the edge. So they are using that everything-as-a-service momentum to change their industry, their market, and the relationship they have with their customers. It helps especially as they pivot into a digital customer experience. Can that experience be constructed around a different business model?

We found that that’s a really useful way of deconstructing and simplifying what is actually quite a complex landscape. And if you can abstract -- if you can use a model to abstract away the chaos and create some simplicity -- that’s a really powerful thing. We all know that good models that abstract away complexity and create simplicity are hugely valuable in helping organizations reconstruct themselves.

Gardner: Clearly, before the pandemic, some organizations dragged their feet on digital transformation as you’ve described it. They had a bit of inertia. But the pandemic has spurred a lot of organizations, both public and private, on.

Hopefully, in a matter of some months or even a few years, the pandemic will be in the rearview mirror. But we will be left with the legacy of it, which is an emerging business paradigm of being flexible, agile, and more productive.

Are we going to get a new mode of business agility where the payoff is it commensurate with all the work?

Agility augurs well post-pandemic 

Partridge: That’s the $6 million question, Dana. I would love to crystal ball gaze with you on that one because agility is key to any organization. We all know that there are constraints in traditional customer experiences -- making widgets, selling products, transactional relationships, relationships that don’t lend themselves to having digital value added to them. I wonder how long that model goes on for as we are experiencing this shift toward digital value. And that means not just selling the widget or the product, but augmenting that with digital capabilities, with digital insights, and with new ways of adding value to the customer’s experience beyond just the capital asset.

I think that was being fast-tracked before this global pandemic. And it’s the organizations now that are in the midst of doubling down on that -- getting that digital experience right, ahead of product and prices – that’s the key differentiator when you go to market.

And, for me, that customer experience increasingly now is the digital customer experience. I think that move was well under way before we hit this big crisis. And I can see customers now doubling down, so that if they didn’t get it right pre-pandemic, they are getting it right as they accelerate out of the pandemic. They recognize that that platform is the only way forward.

You will hear a lot of commentators talk about the digital agenda as being driven by what they call the platform-driven economy. Can you create a platform in which your customers are willing to participate, maybe even your ecosystem of partners who are willing to participate and create that kind of shared experience and shared value? Again, that’s something that HPE is very much invested in. As we pivot our business model, to EaaS outcomes, we are having to double down on our customer experience and increasingly that means digitizing that experience through that digital platform agenda.

Gardner: I would like to explore some examples of how this is manifesting itself. How are organizations adjusting to the new normal and leveraging that to a higher level of business capability?

Also, why is a third-party organization like HPE Pointnext Services working within an ecosystem model with many years of experience behind it? How are you specifically gearing up to help organizations manage the process we have been describing?

HPE digital partnerships 

Partridge: This whole revolution requires different engagement models. The relationship HPE shares with its customers is becoming a technologically enabled partnership. Whenever you partner with a customer to help advance their business outcomes, you need a different way to engage with them.

We can continue to have our product-led engagement with customers, because many of them enjoy that relationship. But as we continue to move up the value stack we are going to need to swing to more of an advisory-led engagement model, Dana, where we are as co-invested in the customers’ outcomes as they are.

We understand what they are trying to drive from a business perspective. We understand how technology is opening up and enabling those kinds of outcomes to be materialized, for the value to be realized.

A year ago, we set out to reshape the way we engage with customers around this conversation. To drive that kind of digital partnership, that means sitting down with a customer and to co-innovate, going through workshops of how we as technologists can bring our expertise to the customer as the expert in their industry. Those two minds can meld to create more than one plus one equals two. By using design thinking techniques and co-design techniques, we can analyze the customers’ business problem and shape solutions that manufacture really, really big outcomes for our customers.

For 15 years I have been a consultant inside of HP and HPE and we have always had that strong consulting engine. But now with HPE Pointnext Services we are gearing it around making sure that we are able to address the customers’ business outcomes, enabled through technology.

Never has there been a time when technology has been so welded into a customer's underlying value proposition. ... There has never been a more open-door policy from our partners and customers.

And the timing is right-on. Never has there been a time when technology has been so welded into a customer’s underlying value proposition. I have been 25 years in IT. In the past, we could have gotten away with being a good partner to IT inside of our customer accounts. We could have gotten away with constantly challenging that price and performance ratio and renovating that agenda so that it delivers better productivity to the organization.

But as technology makes its way into the underlying business model -- as it becomes the differentiating business model -- it’s no longer just a productivity question. Now it’s about how partners work to unlock new digital revenue streams. Well, that needs a new engagement model.

And so that’s the work that we have been doing in my team, the Digital Advisory and Transformation Practice, to engage customers in that value-based discussion. Technology has made its way into that value proposition. There has never been a more open-door policy from our partners and customers who want to engage in that dialogue. They genuinely want to get the benefit of a large tech company applying itself to the customers’ underlying business challenges. That’s the partnership that they want, and there is no excuse for us not to walk through that door very confidently.

Gardner: Craig, specifically at HPE Pointnext Services, what’s the secret sauce that allows you to take on this large undertaking of digital transformation?

Mapping businesses’ DX ambition

Partridge: The development of this model has led to a series of unique pieces of intellectual property (IP) we use to help advance the customer ambition. I don’t think there has ever been a moment in time quite like this with the digital conversation.

Customers recognize that technology is the fundamental weapon to transform and differentiate themselves in the market. They are reaching out to technology partners to say, “Come and participate with me using technology to fundamentally change my value proposition.” So we are being invited in now as a tech company to help organizations move that value proposition forward in a way that we never were before.

In the past, HPE’s pedigree has been constantly challenging the optimization of assets and the price-performance, making sure that platform services are delivered in a very efficient and effective way. But now customers are looking to HPE to uniquely go underneath the covers of their business model -- not just their operating model, but their business model.

Now, we are not writing the board-level strategy for digital ambition because there is a great sweet spot for us, rather it’s where customers have a digital North Star, some digital ambition, but are struggling to realize it. They are struggling to land those initiatives that are, by definition, technology-enabled. That’s where tech companies like HPE are at the forefront of driving digital ambition.

So we have this unique IP, this model we developed inside of HPE Pointnext Services, and the methodology of how to apply it. We can use it as a visualization tool, as a storytelling tool to be able to better communicate, and onward to further communicate your businesses’ digital ambitions.

We can use it to map out the initiatives and look at where those overlap and duplications occur inside organizations. We are truly looking at this from edge to cloud and as-a-service -- that holistic side of the map helps us unpick the risks, dependencies, and prerequisites. We can use the map to inspire new ideas and advance a customer’s new thinking about how technology might be enabled.

We can also deploy the map with our building blocks behind each of the journeys, knowing what digital capabilities need to be brought on-stream and in what sequence. Then we can de-risk a customer’s path to value. That’s a great moment in time for us and it’s uniquely ours. Certainly, the model is uniquely ours and the way we apply it is uniquely ours.

But it’s also a timing thing, Dana. There has never been a better time in the industry where customers are seeking advice from a technology giant like HPE. So it’s a mixture of having the right IP, having the right opportunity, and the right moment as well.

Gardner: So how should such organizations approach this? We talked about the methodology but initiating something like this map and digital ambition narrative can be daunting. How do we start the process?

How to pose the right questions 

Partridge: It begins by understanding a description of this complex landscape, as we have explored in this discussion. Begin to visualize your own digital ambition. See if you can take two or three top initiatives that you are driving and explore them across the map. So what’s the overriding KPI? Where does it start?

Then ask yourself the questions in the middle of the map. What are the key enablers? Am I addressing a shared intelligence backbone? How am I handling trust, security, and resiliency? What am I doing to look at the operating model and the people? How is the culture central to all of this? How am I going to provide it as-a-service? Am I going to consume component parts of the service? How to stress over into the supply chain? How is it addressing the experience?

HPE Pointnext Services’ map is a beautiful tool to help any customer today start to plot their own initiatives and say, “Well, am I thinking of this initiative in a fully 360° way.”

If you are stuck, come and ask HPE. A lot of my advisors around the world map their customers initiatives over to this framework. And we start to ask questions. We start to unveil some of the risks and dependencies and prerequisites. As you put in more and more initiatives and programs, you can begin to see duplication in the middle of the model play out. That enables customers to de-risk and be quicker to path of value because they can deduplicate what they can now see as a common shared digital backbone. Often customers are running those in isolation but seeing it through this lens helps them deduplicate that effort. That’s a quicker path to value.

We engage customers around one- to two-day ideation workshops. Those are very structured ways of having creative, outside-of-the-box type thinking and putting in enough of a value proposition behind the idea to excite people.

We do a lot around ideation and design thinking. If customers have yet to figure out a digital initiative, what’s their North Star, where should they start? We engage customers around one- to two-day ideation workshops. Those are very structured ways of having creative, outside-of-the-box-type thinking and putting in enough of a value proposition behind the idea to excite people.

We had a customer in Italy come to us and say, “Well, we think we need to do something with AI, but we are not quite sure where the value is.”

Then we have a way of engaging to help you accelerate, and that’s really about identifying what the critical digital capabilities are. Think of it at the functional level first. What digital functions do I need to be able to achieve some level of outcome? And then get that into some kind of backlog so you know how to sequence it. And again, we work with customers to help do that as well.

There are lots of ways to slice this, but, ultimately, dive in, get an initiative on the map, and begin to look at the risks and dependencies as you map it through the framework. Are you asking the right questions? Is there a connection to another part of the map that you haven’t examined yet that you should be examining? Is there a part of the initiative that you have missed? That is the immediate get-go start point.

Gardner: I’m afraid we will have to leave it there. We have been examining how to better architect businesses for not only managing ongoing disruption, but to get to a new and better way of doing business.

And we have learned how HPE Pointnext Services advises organizations on using digital transformation to take advantage of new and emerging market opportunities.

So please join me in thanking our guest, Craig Partridge, Senior Director Worldwide, Digital Advisory and Transformation Practice Lead at HPE Pointnext Services. Thank you so much, Craig.

Partridge: Thanks, Dana. It was great fun speaking to you again.

Gardner: And thanks as well to our audience for joining this sponsored BriefingsDirect Voice of 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. See the video. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

A discussion on how HPE Pointnext Services advises organizations on using digital transformation to take advantage of new and emerging opportunities. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2020. All rights reserved.

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How Modern Operational Services Leads to More Self-Managing, Self-Healing, and Self-Optimizing for IT

A discussion on how Hewlett Packard Enterprise Pointnext Services is reinventing the experience of IT support to increasingly rely on automation, analytics, and agility.

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

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the BriefingsDirect Voice of Innovation podcast series.

Gardner

I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing discussion on how enterprise IT has entered a new era for services and support.

General digital business transformation and managing the new normal around the COVID-19 pandemic have hugely impacted how businesses and IT operate. Faced with mounting complexity, rapid change, and striking budgets, IT operational services must be smarter and more efficient than ever.

Stay with us here as we examine how Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Pointnext Services is reinventing the experience of IT support to increasingly rely on automation and analytics to help enable continued customer success.

Here to share the HPE Pointnext Services vision for the future of IT operational services are Gerry Nolan, Director of Portfolio Product Management, Operational Service Portfolio, at HPE Pointnext Services. Welcome, Gerry.

Gerry Nolan: Hi, Dana. Thank you for having us.

Gardner: We are also here with Ronaldo Pinto, Director of Portfolio Product Management, Operational Service Portfolio, at HPE Pointnext Services. Welcome, Ronaldo.

Ronaldo Pinto: Thank you, Dana. It’s a pleasure to be with you.

Gardner: Gerry, is it fair to say that IT has never had a more integral part of nearly all businesses and that therefore the intelligent support of IT has never been more critical?

IT delivers digitally in the new normal 

Nolan: We’ve never seen a time like this, Dana. Pretty much every aspect of our life has now moved to digital. It was already moving that way. Everyone is spending more hours per day in various collaboration platforms, going through various digital interactions, and we’re seeing that in our business as well.

Nolan

That applies to whether you are ordering a pizza, booking time at your gym, getting your morning coffee -- pretty much your life has changed forever. We see that dramatically impacting the IT space and the customers we deal with.

So, yes, it’s a unique time, we have never seen it before, and we believe things will never be the same again.

Gardner: So, we are reliant on technology for commerce, healthcare, finance, all across many of these scientific activities to combat the pandemic, not to mention more remote education and more remote work -- basically every facet of our modern life.

Consequently, how enterprise IT uses services and support has entered a new phase, a new era. Please explain why a digital environment requires more tools and opportunity to the people delivering the new operational services.

Nolan: The IT landscape is very dynamic. There is an expanding array of technology choices, which brings more complexity. Of course, the move to cloud and edge computing introduces new requirements from an IT operations point of view.

Then we got hit with COVID-19 and a whole new set of challenges -- huge increases in remote workforce, and all creating problems with networks, performance, and security.

For example, a retail customer that I just met with -- they don’t even have a four-walls data center anymore, most of their IT is distributed throughout their retail stores -- and another customer, a large telco, is installing edge-related servers on their electricity pylons on the sides of mountains in very remote areas. These types of use-cases need very different operational processes, approaches, and skills.

Then we got hit with COVID-19, and that brings a whole new set of challenges, with locking down of IT environments, huge increases in remote workforces, all creating problems with network capacity, performance, and security challenges.

As a result, we are seeing customers needing more help than ever while they try and maintain their businesses. At the same time, they need to plan and evolve for the medium- to long-term. They need solutions both for today -- to help in this unique lockdown mode -- but also to accelerate transformation efforts to move to a digitally enabled customer experience.

Gardner: Ronaldo, this obviously requires more than a traditional helpdesk and telephone support. Where does the operational experience, of even changing the culture around support, kick in? How do we get to a new experience?

Pinto

Pinto: Dana, many people associate traditional support to telephone support, but today it needs to be much more. As Gerry described, we are moving toward a very distributed, remote, low-touch to no-touch world, and COVID-19, the pandemic, just accelerated that.

To operate in such an environment, companies depend on an increasing number of tools and technologies. You have more variables today, just to control and maintain your performance. So it’s extremely important to arm the people that provide technical support with the latest artificial intelligence (AI) tools and digital infrastructure so they continue to be effective in the work they do.

Gardner: Gerry, how has the pandemic and emphasis on remote services accelerated people’s willingness to delve into the newer technologies around automation, AI, predictive analytics and AIOps? Are people more open now to all of that?

Nolan: No question, Dana. Consider any great customer experience that you have today -- from dealing with your mobile phone provider to, in my case recently, my utility company. The great experiences offer a variety of ways to access the information and the help you may need on a 24-7 basis. Typically, this has involved a whole range of different elements -- from a portal or an app, to some central hub -- for how you engage. That can include getting a more personalized dashboard of information and help. Those experiences also often have different engagement options, including access to live people who can answer questions and provide guidance to solve issues. That central hub also provides a wealth of helpful, useful information and can be AI-enabled to provide predictive alerts via dashboards.

There are companies that still provide only a single channel, such as, for example, the utility company I had to call yesterday, which kept me on hold for 45 minutes until I hung up. I tried the website, and they had multiple websites. I sent an e-mail; I am still waiting for a response!

The great customer experiences have multiple elements and dimensions to them. They have great people you can talk to. You have multiple ways of getting to those people. They have a great app or website with all sorts of information and help available, personalized to your needs.

That’s the way of the future. Those companies that are successful and have already started on that path are seeing great success. Those that have not are struggling -- especially in this climate. Now, not only is there more need to go digital, the pressure on revenue limits the investment dollars available to move in that direction if you haven’t already done so.

So, yes, there’s a multitude of different challenges here we are dealing with.

Gardner: It’s amazing nowadays when you deal, as a customer, with companies, how you can recognize almost instantly the ones that have invested in digital business transformation and are able to do a lot of different things under duress -- and those who didn’t. It’s rather stark.

Ronaldo, dealing with these complexities isn’t just a technology issue. Oftentimes it includes a multi-vendor aspect, a large ecosystem of suppliers. Pointing fingers isn’t going to help if you’re in a time-constrained situation, a crisis situation.

How do the new operational experiences include the capability to bring in many vendors and even so provide a seamless experience back to that customer?

Seamless collaborations succeed 

Pinto: HPE has historically collaborated. If you look at our customers today, they have best-of-breed environments and there are many emerging tools that make those environments more efficient. We also have several startups.

So, it’s extremely important for us to serve our customers by being able to collaborate seamlessly with all of those companies. We have done that in the past and we are expanding the operational capabilities, including tools we have today, to better understand performance, integration between our products, and with third-party products. We can streamline all of that collaboration.

Gardner: And, of course, the complexity extends across hybrid environments, from edge to cloud -- multi-cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud. Is that multi-vendor and multi-architecture mix something that you’re encountering a lot?

Nolan: Today, every customer has a multi-vendor IT landscape. There are various phases of maturity in terms of dealing with legacy environments. But they are dealing with new IT on-premises technologies, they are trying to deploy cloud, or they may be moving to public cloud. There’s a plethora of use cases we see globally with our customers.

The classic issue is when there's a problem, the finger-pointing or blame-game starts. Even triaging and isolating problems in these environments can be a challenge, let alone the expertise to fix the issue. The more vendors you work with the more dimensions you have to manage.

And the classic issue, as you point out, is when there’s a problem, the finger-pointing or the blame-game starts. Even triaging and isolating problems in these types of environments can be a challenge, let alone having the expertise to fix the issue. Whether it’s in the hardware, software layer, or on somebody else’s platform, it’s difficult. Most vendors, of course, have different service level agreements (SLAs), different role names, different processes, and different contractual and pricing structures.

So, the whole engagement model, even the vocabulary they use, can be quite different; ourselves included, by the way. So, the more vendors you have to work with, the more dimensions you have to manage.

And then, of course, COVID-19 hits and our customers working with multiple vendors have to rely on how all those vendors are reacting to the current climate. And they’re not all reacting in a consistent fashion. The more vendors you have, the more work and time it’s going to take -- and the more cost involved.

We call it the power of one. Our customers see huge value in working with a partner who provides a single point of contact, that single throat to choke or hand to shake, and a single focal point for dealing with issues. You can have a single contract, a single invoice, and a single team to work with. It saves a lot of time and it saves a lot of money.

Organizations already in that position are seeing significant benefits. Our multi-vendor business is growing very, very well. And we see that moving into the future as companies try to focus on their core business, whatever that might be, and let IT take care of itself.

Edge to cloud to data center 

Pinto: To your question, Dana, on hybrid environments, it’s not only hybrid, it’s edge to cloud and to the data center. I can give you two examples.

We have a large department store customer with the technology in each of the many stores. We support not only the edge environments in those stores but all the way through to their data center. There are also hybrid environments for data management where you typically have primary storage, secondary storage, and your archiving strategy. All of that is managed by a multitude of backup and data-movement software.

The customer should not be worried with component by component, but with a single, end-to-end solution. We help customers abstract that by supporting the end-to-end data environment and collaborating with the third-party software vendors or platform vendors that will inevitably be a part of the solution.

Gardner: Gerry, earlier you mentioned your own experience with a utility company. You were expecting a multi-channel opportunity to engage with them. How does the IT operational services as an experience become inclusive of such things? Why does that need to be all-inclusive across the solutions and support approaches?

Have it your way

Nolan: An alternative example that I can give is my bank. I have a couple of different banks that I work with, but one in particular invested early in a digital platform. They didn’t replace their brick and mortar models. They still have lots of branches, lots of high-tech ATMs that allow for all types of self-serve.

But they also have a really cool app and website, which they’ve had for a number of years. They didn’t introduce digital as a way of closing down their branches, they keep all of those options available because different people like to integrate and work with their service providers in different ways, and we see that in IT, too.

The key elements to delivering a successful experience in the IT space, an AI-enabled experience, includes having lots of expertise and knowledge available across the IT environment, not just on a single set of products.

Of course, a digital platform provides that personalized view. It includes things like dashboards of what’s in my environment, ongoing alerts and predictions -- maybe capacity is running out or maybe costs are beyond what was forecast. Or maybe I have ways of optimizing my costs, some insights around updates to my software, licenses or some systems might be reaching the end of their support life. There is all sorts of information that should be available to me in a personalized way.

And then in terms of accessing experts, the old model is to get on the phone, like I was yesterday for 45 minutes talking to somebody, and in my case, I wasn’t successful. But customers, in some cases, they like to deal with the experts through a chat window or maybe live on the phone. Others like to watch expert technical tips and technique videos. So, we have developed an extensive video library of experts wherein you can pick and choose and listen to some tips and techniques about how to deal with certain key topics we see that customers are interested in.

Moderated forums: Customers actually like sharing their experiences with each other. And then our experts get involved and you mix and match with partners and end-customers and you get this very rich dialogue that goes on around particular topics, best practices, ideas, or there could be problems that somebody else has solved.

AI is at the heart of all of this because it's constantly learning. It's like a self-propelling mechanism that just gets better over time. The more knowledge it gains, the more answers are provided.

AI is at the heart of all of this because it’s constantly learning. It’s like a self-propelling mechanism that just gets better over time. The more people come on board, the more knowledge it gains, the more questions they ask, the more answers are provided.

The whole thing just gets better and better over time. It’s key, of course, to have that wide portfolio of help for customers. If they have a strategy, make it work better; if they don’t have a strategy and need help building one, we can help them do that all the way through to designing and implementing those solutions.

And then they can get the ongoing support, which is where Ronaldo and I spend most of our life. But it’s important as a vendor or as a partner to be able to offer customers help across the value chain or across the lifecycle, depending on where they need that help.

Gardner: Ronaldo, let’s dig more deeply into the specifics of the new HPE Pointnext Services’ operational services’ approach, modernizing operations for the future of IT. What does it include?

Meet customers’ modernization terms 

Pinto: We are doing all of this modernization with the customer in mind. What is really important for us is not only accomplishing something, but how you accomplish it. At the end of any interaction the customer needs to feel that their time was used effectively. HPE shows a legitimate concern with the customer success and in feeling positive at the end of the interaction.

Gerry mentioned the AI tools and alerts. We are integrating all of the sensors, telemetry we get from products in the field, all the way up to our operational processes in the back end so that customers can accomplish whatever they need with us on their own terms.

For example, if there’s an alert or a performance degradation in a product, we provide tools to dig deeper and understand why. “Hey, maybe it’s a component in the infrastructure that needs to be updated or replaced?” We are integrating all of that. We see into our back end operational processes so that we can even detect issues before the customer does. Then we just notify the customer that an action needs to be performed and, if needed, we dispatch the part replacement.

If the customer needs someone at the site to do the replacement, no problem. The customer can schedule that visit easily in a web interface and we will show up in the window that the customer chooses.

It’s offering the customer, as Gerry mentioned, multiple channels and multiple ways to interact. For customers, it means they may prefer a remote automated web interface or the personal touch of a support engineer, but it should be on the customers’ own terms.

Gardner: I have seen in the release information you provide to analysts like myself the concept of a digital customer platform. What do you mean by a digital customer platform when it comes to operational services?

A focused digital platform 

Nolan: It’s all of the things that Ronaldo just mentioned coming together in a single place. Going back to my bank example, they give you a credit card where you typically have a single place that you go from a digital point of view. It’s either an app and/or a website and that provides you all of this personalized information that’s honed to your specific needs and your specific use case.

For us, from a digital point of view and from a customization platform, we want to provide a single place regardless of your use case. So, whether you are a warranty level customer or a consumption customer, buying your IT on a pay-as-you-go basis, all of the help you need, all of the information, dashboards, all of the ways of engaging with us as a partner, it’s all through a single portal. That’s what we mean when we say the digital platform, that central place that brings it all to life for you as a customer.

Gardner: Why is the consumption-based approach important? How has that changed the game?

Pinto: It’s the same idea, to provide customers the option to consume IT and to use IT on their own terms. HPE pioneered the hybrid IT consumption model. Behind that is Pointnext through all the services we provide -- whether the customer chooses to consume or not, on an as-a-service basis, consuming an outcome, or if the customer wants to consume the traditional way, where the customer takes ownership of their underlying infrastructure. We automate those more transactional, repeatable tasks and help the customer focus on innovation and meeting their business objectives through IT. So that is going to be consistent across all the consumption models.

Nolan: What’s important to recognize here is, as a customer, you want choice and choice is good. If the only option you have is, for example, a public cloud solution, then guess what? Every problem you as a customer have, then that public cloud provider has one toolbox. It’s a public cloud solution.

I have just been speaking with a large insurance company and they are moving toward a cloud-first strategy, which their board decided they needed. So, everything in their mind needs to move to the cloud. And it’s interesting because they decided the way they are going to partner to get that done is directly with a public cloud vendor. And guess what? Every problem, every workload in that organization is now directed toward moving to public cloud, even where that may not be the best outcome for the customer. To Ronaldo’s point, you want to be assessing all of your workloads and deciding where is the best placement of that workload.

You might want to do that work inside your firewall and on your network because certain work will get done better, more cost effectively, and for all sorts of security, network latency, and data regulatory reasons. Having multiple different choices -- on-premises, you can do CAPEX, you can do as-a-service -- is important. Your partner should be able to offer all those choices. We at HPE, as Ronaldo said, pioneered the IT as-a-service mode. We already have that in place.

 Our HPE GreenLake offering allows you to buy and consume all of your IT on a pay-as-you-go basis. We just send you a monthly bill for whatever IT you have used. Everything is included in that bill -- your hardware, software, and all of the services, including support. You don’t really need to worry about it.

You care instead about the outcomes. You just want the IT to take care of itself, and you get your bill. Then you can easily align that cost with the revenue coming in. As the revenue goes up, you are using more IT, you pay more; revenue goes down, you are using less IT, you pay less. Fairly simple, but very powerful and very popular.

Gardner: Yes, in the past we have heard so many complaints about unexpected bills, maintenance add-ons, and complex licensing. So, this is something that’s been an ongoing issue for decades.

Now with COVID-19 and so many people working remotely, can you provide an example of bringing the best minds on the solutions side to wherever a problem is?

Room with a data center view 

Nolan: One that comes to mind sounds like a simplistic use case, but it’s valuable in today’s climate, with the IT lockdown. Inside of HPE, we use multiple collaboration environments. But we own our own collaboration platform, HPE MyRoom.

We launched a feature in that collaboration platform called Visual Remote Guidance, which allows us to collaborate like we are in the customer’s data center virtually. We can turn on the smart device on the customer side, and they can be enabled, through the camera, to actually see the IT situation they are dealing with.

It might be an installation of some hardware. It could be resolving some technical problem. There are a variety of different use cases we are seeing. Of course, when a system causes a problem and the company has locked-down their entire IT department, they don’t want to see engineers coming in from either HPE or one of our partners.

Visual Remote Guidance allows us to collaborate like we are in the customer's data center virtually. We can turn on the smart device on the customer side and they can be enabled to see the IT situation that they are all dealing with.

This solution immediately became very useful in helping customers because we now have thousands of remote experts available in various locations around the world. Now, they can instantly connect with the customer. They can be the hands and eyes working with the customer. Then the customer can perform the action, guided all the way through the process by their remote HPE expert. And that’s using a well-proven digital collaboration platform that we have had for years. By just introducing that one new additional feature, it has helped tremendously.

Many customers were struggling with installing complex solutions. Because they needed to get it done and yet didn’t want to bring anybody onto their site, we can take advantage of our remote experts and get the work done. Our experts guide them through, step by step, and test the whole thing. It’s proving to be very effective. It’s used extensively now around the world. All of our agents have this on their desktop and they can initiate with any customer, in any conversation. So, it’s pretty powerful.

Gardner: Yes, so you have socialized isolation, but you have intense technology collaboration at the same time.

Ronaldo, HPE InfoSight and automation have gone a long way to helping organizations get in front of maintenance issues, to be proactive and prescriptive. Can you flesh out any examples of where the combination of automation, AI, AIOps, and HPE InfoSight have come together in a way that helps people get past a problem before it gets out of hand?

Stop problems before they start

Pinto: Yes, absolutely. We are integrating all our telemetry from the sensors in our technology with our back-end operational processes. That is InfoSight, a very powerful, AI and machine learning (ML) tool. By collecting from sensors -- more than 100 data points from our products every few seconds -- and processing all of that data on the back end, we can be informed by trends we see in our installed base and gather knowledge from our product experts and data scientists.

That allows us to get in front of situations that could result in outages in the environment. For example, a virtual storage volume could be running out of capacity. That could lead to storage devices going offline, bringing down the whole environment. So, we can get ahead of that and fix the problem for the customer before it gets to a business-degradation situation.

We are expanding the InfoSight capabilities on a daily basis throughout the HPE portfolio. We also should be able to identify, based on the telemetry of the products, what workloads the customer is running and help the customer better utilize all those underlying resources in the context of a specific workload. We also could even identify an improvement opportunity in the underlying infrastructure to improve the performance of that workload.

Gardner: So, it is problem solving as well as a drive for continual IT improvement, refinement, and optimization, which is a lot different than a break-fix mentality. How will the whole concept of operational services shift in your opinion from break-fix to more of optimization and continuous improvement?

Pinto: I think you just touched on probably the most important point, Dana. Data centers today and technology are increasingly redundant and resilient. So really break-fix is becoming table stakes very quickly.

The metaphor that I use many times is airlines. In the past, security or safety of the airline was something very important. Today it’s basically table stakes. You assume that the airline operates at the highest standards of safety. So, with break-fix it’s the same. HPE is automating all of the break-fix operations to allow customers to focus on what adds the most value to their businesses, which is delivering the business outcomes based on the technology -- and further innovating.

The pace of innovation in this business is unprecedented, both in terms of tools and technologies available to operate your environment as well as time-to-market of the digital applications that are the revenue generators for our customers.

Gardner: Gerry, anything additional to offer in terms of the vision of an optimization drive rather than a maintenance drive?

Innovate to your ideal state 

Nolan: Totally. It’s all about trying to stay ahead of the business requirements.

For example, last night Ronaldo and I were speaking with a customer with a global footprint. They happen to be in a pretty good state, but it was interesting talking to them about what would a new desired state look like. We work closely with customers as we innovate and build better service capabilities. We are trying to find out from our customers what is their ideal state, because it’s all about delivering the customer experience that maps to each customer’s use case -- and every customer is different.

I also just met with a casino operator, which at the moment is in a bit of a tough space, but they have been acquiring other casinos and opening new casinos in different parts of the world. Their challenge is completely different than my friend in the insurance industry who was going to cloud-first.

The casino business is all about security and regulation. They are really not in the business of IT -- but IT is still critical to their success. They are trying to understand all the IT that they have.

The casino business is all about security, and a lot of regulation. In his case, they were buying companies, so they are also buying all of this IT. They need help controlling it. They are in the casino business, they are not really in the business of IT, but IT is still critical to their success. And now they are in a pandemic-driven shutdown, so they are trying to figure out how to manage and understand all of the IT they have.

For others in this social isolation climate, they need to keep the business running. Now as they are starting to open up, they need help with all sorts of issues around how to monitor customers coming into their facilities. How do they keep staff safe in terms of making sure they stay six feet apart? And HPE has a wealth of new offerings in that space. We can help customers deal with opening up and getting back to work.

Whether you are operating an old environment, a new environment, or are in a post COVID-19 journey -- trying to get through this pandemic situation, which is going to take years -- there are all sorts of different aspects you need to consider as an organization. Trying to paint your new vision for what an ideal IT experience feels like -- and then finding partners like HPE who can help deliver that -- is really the way forward.

Gardner: I’m afraid we will have to leave it there. We have been exploring how digital business transformation and managing the new normal around COVID-19 pandemic issues have hugely impacted how businesses and IT operate. And we have learned now how HPE Pointnext Services has reinvented the experience of IT support to increasingly rely on automation, analytics, and agility.

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

Nolan: Thank you very much, Dana. It was a pleasure talking to you today.

Gardner: We have also been here with Ronaldo Pinto, Director of Portfolio Product Management, Operational Service Portfolio, at HPE Pointnext Services. Thank you as well, Ronaldo.

Pinto: Thanks for the opportunity Dana and stay safe.

Gardner: And thanks, as well, to our audience for joining this sponsored BriefingsDirect Voice of 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.

 A discussion on how Hewlett Packard Enterprise Pointnext Services has reinvented the experience of IT support to increasingly rely on automation, analytics, and agility. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2020. All rights reserved.

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