HP Prepares Enterprise Managed Services Push

Hewlett-Packard is pushing deeper into the enterprise managed services market -- launching a series of remote monitoring and proactive services. Strangely, HP isn't using the managed services term to describe the effort -- which is dubbed HP Next Generation Customer Support Experience. And here's another twist: Apparently, it's going to take HP 12 to 18 months to fully roll out the enterprise managed services. Here's the update.

According to an announcement today, the HP effort will reduce customer outages and lower the total cost of IT ownership through personalized proactive support. (It almost sounds like HP has been reading MSP strategies in the SMB and applying them to the enterprise.) HP says the Next Generation Customer Support Experience will include:

• Quicker problem resolution with advanced, 24/7 remote monitoring that automates diagnostics and notifications for HP and multivendor products. HP support addresses issues with its own technologies in addition to multivendor environments;
• Reduced staff time spent on maintenance with automated service requests that direct products needing attention to top HP services professionals, so clients can stay focused on running their businesses, instead of performing routine maintenance;
• Personalized and proactive support designed to improve the health and performance of clients’ technology environments with a new support portal; and
• Entitlement based access to HP system updates, including the latest support “how to” information, upgrades, user forums and HP experts.
• Guaranteed use of only HP genuine parts; HP genuine parts always in stock.

The could be also be a channel partner angle here. HP says its worldwide network of authorized support partners will assist with the next-generation support effort. But here's a rather interesting twist: HP says the "HP Next Generation Customer Support Experience will be rolled out in phases over the next 12 to 18 months." That's quite a long time horizon considering how quickly the MSP market evolves.

In the meantime we're poking around to find out if HP plans to leverage any third-party remote monitoring and management (RMM) tools. HP, as MSPmentor has noted, already has an established relationship in place with Level Platforms.

We'll also watch to see if HP applies its enterprise managed services experience to the SMB market. Dell has already attempted to support SMB customers with managed services. But to the best of my knowledge the effort has been hit-and-miss. There hasn't been much buzz about Dell Managed Services in recent months. We're scheduled to speak with Dell in the next few days and will seek an update.

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