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

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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 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 solutions to satisfy this new era of higher IT tech support
expectations.
We will 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 are our guests, 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.
Nolan

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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.
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 -- making
sure that better IT experiences translate to those
enterprise customers. It’s a very interesting time.
Brothers
The important part of the
whole equation is making
sure that better IT
experiences translate to
those enterprise customers.

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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 IT 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.
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.
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
augmented reality and virtual reality.

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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?
Digital transformation 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 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.
Enterprises are asking, “How well
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?”

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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 directs system 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.
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.

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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 for start-to-finish 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.
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. In the post-
It’s really helpful for a customer if
they can work with a single vendor
… they can get support for their
legacy, deploy new on-premises
technologies, and integrate that
together with their legacy.

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HPE Pointnext Tech Care world, 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
Customers don’t just want a
support experience around
buying the product, they want it
all the way through its lifetime.

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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 avoid downtime
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.”
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
What those corrective, predictive
capabilities can do at that base
layer – is patch management and
patch planning.

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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.
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.

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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 to reduce 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 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).
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 – that’s the endgame.

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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, more to come
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
Since InfoSight was first deployed
in that storage environment alone,
we’ve measured about 1.5 million
hours of saved productivity time.

12. Page 12 of 15
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 into innovation
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.
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
The incidents have almost
disappeared – and now they’re
focused on innovation.

13. Page 13 of 15
take advantage of the offerings that organizations such as HPE are providing with HPE
Pointnext Tech Care?
Evaluate vendor experience before product
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
HPE Pointnext Tech Care …
is a full product experience,
not a product – and customers
then choose their support
experience on the side.

14. Page 14 of 15
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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