HP Expands Technology Services Including Datacenter Care, Flexible Capacity

Hewlett-Packard Tuesday unveiled new consulting services it said solution providers can use to help customers looking to implement software-defined infrastructures.

The new services, unveiled at the HP Discover 2014 conference being held this week in Barcelona, Spain, include improved automation capabilities and an expansion of a flexible capacity solution that provides cloud-like flexibility for pricing of compute and storage resources, said EJ Bodnar, vice president of marketing for HP Technology Services.

The new services provide support and consulting for what HP terms a new style of IT, Bodnar told CRN.

[Related: HP CTO Fink: HP Helion Cloud, 'The Machine' On Tap To Revolutionize IT]

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"Customers today have traditional, complex IT environments," he said. "They're not as flexible, agile or responsive as customers need. They have manual processes, and are siloed. The new style of IT depends on infrastructure pools with service-center infrastructure. They are fast and agile, and deliver services as quickly as possible."

New this week from HP Technology Services is an expansion of its Datacenter Care which has been the foundation for HP to build flexible, comprehensive support for data centers since its 2012 launch, Bodnar said.

The expansion includes three components.

The first is Datacenter Care Infrastructure Automation, a new service focused on helping infrastructure developers quickly move their solutions to production, Bodnar said.

"We are automating the process," he said. "Think of it as infrastructure-as-code. We allow the IT environment to be written, documented and deployed using code as they are in the application code world."

The second is an advanced solution that allows monitoring of storage, server and networking solutions from a wide range of vendors including Cisco Systems, IBM and Oracle in a unified fashion, Bodnar said.

The third is Datacenter Care support for HP Helion OpenStack solutions, he said.

Also new from HP is HP Technology Services for Software-defined Infrastructure, which offers services for IT transformation strategies, software-defined roadmaps and software-defined infrastructure design, Bodnar said.

HP also expanding its HP Flexible Capacity for SAP HANA solution to now work with its new HP ConvergedSystem 500 solution, which was released in March.

HP Flexible Capacity allows server, storage and networking resources to be charged for on a per-use basis, giving customers cloud-like pricing that rises as more resources are used and drops when fewer resources are used.

NEXT: HP Technology Services And The Channel

HP's new technology services will open fresh opportunities to partners and their customers, said Mike Vencel, senior vice president of Comport Technology Solutions, a Ramsey, N.J.-based solution provider and platinum-level HP partner.

"We're really excited about their Flexible Capacity model," Vencel told CRN. "It gives customers the opportunity to procure and deploy HP servers, storage and networking on-premises but with the economic model of the cloud. We're seeing more and more customer interest in moving from a capex model to an opex model."

Rich Baldwin, CIO and chief strategy officer of Nth Generation Computing, a San Diego-based solution provider and long-term HP channel partner, said his company is looking forward to deploying more of HP Technology Services offerings, including Flexible Capacity.

"The key here is, HP has figured out how to pay the channel partners as if we sold the equipment," Baldwin told CRN. "We work with HP on the quote. HP issues us a purchase order, and we ship to the customer. But HP pays us for the equipment."

It is an interesting model, Baldwin said. "Channel partners used to making a lot of money on selling equipment have been put off by pay-as-you-go models," he said. "The dollars come in later than they do for actual sales, and there is a fear of what might happen if a customer goes bankrupt."

HP currently has about 2,600 ServiceOne partners helping customers with HP services like Datacenter Care and Flexible Capacity, Bodnar said.

"Datacenter Care and Flexible Capacity are different from services attached to hardware sales," he said. "They are more sticky and let partners differentiate themselves. These services give partners an opportunity to earn as customers grow. It lets our partners deliver cloud computing transformation to customers."

PUBLISHED DEC. 2, 2014