HP Upgrades, Adds Storage Services

"Our strategy is to have as many partners as possible offer services, and as many as possible deliver them if they get certified," said Gary Wright, vice president of network storage services for HP. Wright added that the channel accounts for 68 percent of HP's worldwide enterprise systems revenue.

Mark Romanowski, senior vice president of client services and business development at AMC, a New York HP solution provider, said HP is making it known that it needs to partner on services.

>> Solution providers can sell the HP services as well as after-sales services such as maintenance.

"They want to focus on their core business and plan to partner on the rest with best-of-breed partners, and that's the channel," Romanowski said.

One of the new services, Critical Services for SANs, guarantees that multiple SANs can be connected with no downtime on that connectivity, Wright said. The initial implementations of this service will be for Brocade Communications-based SAN fabrics, which represent about 80 percent of the potential market, he said. The service will be expanded to other fabrics in the future.

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With the second new service, Data Migration Service, HP is using an exclusive license with Fujitsu Softek's Migration Tool to guarantee that data can be migrated from any storage platform to any other platform in a nondisruptive manner.

HP also is enhancing its SAN Solution Service, which offers basic SAN installation, and its Backup and Rapid Recovery Solution Service, for data backups and restores, by combining overlapping legacy HP and Compaq programs, Wright said.

Solution providers can sell the services, as well as related after-sales services such as maintenance, Wright said. Solution providers that get certified in the services will act as subcontractors to HP, he said.

Dave Goldsmith, president of Sapphire Systems, a Roselle, Ill.-based HP solution provider for the education and midsize-business markets, said his company offers similar services on a smaller scale but would like to work with packaged services. "Leveraging HP's services is something we are very much interested in," he said.