HP’s New Device Management Tools: ‘Better Customer Experience’ And ‘Better Revenue For Partner’

With diagnostics and Managed Device Services for PCs, HP Inc. is making it easier for solution providers to diagnose and fix their customer’s most challenging PC problems, while increasing profitability for their businesses, John Gordon, president and GM of HP managed solutions, tells CRN.

HP Inc. is ushering a new era of reliability and availability to the edge by combining years’ worth of its own data, the telemetry it has into its devices, and AI to support “the future of work,” said company executive John Gordon.

“As we have evolved, and we talked about some of the telemetry and AI-based software solutions a few months ago that we were doing for partners, you’re going to hear how those are coming up with new opportunities to change the services for partners, to give them ways to make more money, provide a better level of service to their customers,” Gordon, president and GM of HP managed solutions, told CRN.

HP has announced a new set of device management solutions for PC, print and collaboration tools that are available for channel resell. The tools give resellers and systems integrators a way to configure and repair a customer’s entire line of HP devices, along with providing regular reports and mitigating problems before they become service issues.

Gordon said these new offers give partners a more strategic relationship with their customers, adding more flexibility to remediate issues on the partner’s schedule, improving customer uptime and partner profitability.

“What you’re doing here is not only making a better customer experience, which is the important part, but because you’re being proactive about it, you don’t have to react as much in the same way, and you get to be able to coordinate it around your schedule a little bit better,” he told CRN. “So it’s not only better experience for the customer, better revenue for the partner.”

In the PC world, 40 to 50 percent of the calls for service are software-related, meaning the device’s hardware is working properly, but configuration, or BIOS update, for example, causing problems for the user, said HP’s Marcos Razon, senior vice president and president of lifecycle services.

For deep-rooted issues such as the dreaded “blue screen of death,” remote fixes were not possible since the device was not capable of booting up, much less connecting to the internet. Now HP has created a workaround for that using Intel chips, Razon said.

“Even if the machine does not boot, even if we have a blue screen as a result of that process, I can take control with the user permission below the BIOS. I don’t need the PC to boot up. So I’m creating a virtual, what we call KVM, keyboard, video and mouse with the agent remotely, and I can start fixing or diagnosing,” he said.

He said it lets him run a BIOS diagnostic, change the configuration, download a driver, all without the PC booting up. While the capability launched for some larger customers last year, Razon said it is coming to the channel: “So that service, we launched it back in November, and what we try and that was exclusively for our big customers, our enterprise customers, but definitely 85 percent of our revenue, top line revenue, comes from channel partners around the world. So we are enabling that. So now we are making that service available for our partners to monitize.”

Razon said that in addition to reselling the service, partners can use it to have a conversation with customers around the value of uptime in the era of hybrid work environments.

“What you have is people working from home, and there’s no office. There’s not an HP office close,” Razon said. “So if something happened with the PC in the current environment, most of the companies, they need to send the PC back, and they need to get a PC probably in two, three days, but for the next two, three days, they’re going to be miserable.”

He said by using this advanced support capability, partners will be able to perform remote remediation for 45 percent more hardware issues for users of HP business PCs with Intel vPro. At the moment it works with HP’s lineup of Intel vPro equipped devices, but the company is working to soon expand its availability to products with AMD chips. Razon said it is one of the ways HP is merging is institutional expertise with data to deliver the best modern outcomes.

“We have invested a lot as a company in telemetry-based devices. So what we do is we put hardware components backed with software components that we can, from afar, and with the permission of a customer, understand what is happening,” he said.

HP’s Managed Device Services for PCs is a partner-sold fleet management solution that gives partners the ability to configure devices for deployment and installation, to include regular reporting, the remote monitoring and management, and proactive remediation as a value add, said Gordon (pictured above).

The offer is available throughout the channel with a reduced seat requirement to target partners with midsized customers.

“They actually have a dedicated HP line they can call and say, ‘Hey, here’s what I’m working on. Help me configure something for this,’ and then we’ll help them configure that for a deal,” Gordon told CRN. “Partners like to be able to pick up the phone and talk to someone and get help putting it all together. So that now gives them an opportunity to add more value to the service they’re providing. And if they’re in the PC space, they can go from delivering PCs and their first level support to how do I actually give you insight over your fleet over time.”

On the printer side of the business, HP Premium+ Support adds out-of-office-hours chat, preferred access to phone agents and HP parts, as well as delivery and service priority, Razon said. The HP-delivered support for print will be available in the U.S. and Canada later this summer, for purchase through HP directly or its authorized channel partners.