HP Launches ‘Revolutionary’ Always On Support

HP today launched what it believes is a revolutionary line-up of support services, designed to help companies with complex software stacks maintain uptime.

The major selling point of Always On Support is vendor-neutrality, the Silicon Valley giant said. HP is looking to cater to businesses running highly virtualised environments, which typically use lots of software from different providers.

HP staff will either be on the end of a phone or online to assist customers needs, but where they don’t have the skills to help, they will contact other vendors for assistance.

Vendor collaboration

“What we’ll have is a list of ISV software that we’ll be providing support for,” Alastair Winner, HP’s Vice President Support Services, told TechWeekEurope. “We recognise a cloud environment is not going to be all HP technology.

“If we have a fix that is known to us, we will offer that fix. If we don’t, we will take the lead and log a call on the customer’s behalf with their support provider of choice. If it’s a niche product we will gladly talk to that customer.”

That service will also require compliance from HP rivals, but Winner was confident other providers would play ball. “We have good relationships with the majority of the ISVs that are usually associated with running on HP’s Converged Infrastructure platform. We feel very confident we can offer a good level of support there,” Winner added. “We can manage relationships with any third-party provider.”

There are three different versions of Always On Support. The basic package is Foundation Care, which offers a single point of contact for support. On the Proactive Care model, which lets customers call up HP professionals rather than just hope for an online response. It also gives them the added benefit of analytics expertise at HP’s end.

The premium product is Datacenter Care, which gives customers all of the above and lets them customise what kind of care they want.

“What we’re building here are what we call playbooks. So we’ll have a playbook for service providers, we’ll have one for someone that might have a hyper-scale, or hyper-scale environment,” Winner added. “We can preconfigure solutions based on our own understanding of the market and what we’ve done before, presenting them with a solution that we think will work well. Then we’ll customise and tune it both from a deliverables perspective and from a financial perspective.”

In all cases, HP professionals already have information on the customer, as well as a view into what technical difficulties they may be experiencing.

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