‘We’re All In’ On The Hybrid Employee Experience

HP Inc. executive Dave Shull has vowed to “make it easy” for partners to drive revenue through services around the hybrid employee experience, calling it a “significant growth opportunity” for the channel.

In an exclusive interview with CRN, Shull, the former Poly CEO who is now president of HP’s Workforce Services and Solutions group, said the main way the Palo Alto, Calif.-based vendor plans to do this is through Workforce Central, a “toolbox” arriving this summer that will consolidate more than 64 of HP’s existing services for PCs, printers and other devices into a single cloud-based dashboard. Workforce Central will also let partners integrate the services into their own systems.

[Related: HP Ushers ‘Next Era of Hybrid Work’ With New Laptops And Solutions]

Shull revealed Workforce Central to partners at HP’s Amplify Partner Conference last month, saying it will turn them into “virtual CIOs” for their customers and create new upsell opportunities.

“This is an HP strategic initiative to say we are all in on solving this space as a corporation because we think we have a really unique set of assets in terms of the gear that we offer: PCs, printers and collaboration. No one else offers that. And so let’s seize that opportunity,” he said.

“And we can do something that a pure software company can’t do because we actually have the telemetry in the devices,” Shull added. “We have dozens of sensors in some of our PCs. How do we make the most of that to provide unique insights that a pure software company is not capable of doing? And so strategically, we’re all in on capturing this employee experience space.”

HP’s Workforce Services and Solutions group is currently a $4 billion business, most of which comes from the vendor’s managed print services and Device-as-a-Service offerings. In a recent interview for CRN’s April cover story about HP, the company’s CEO, Enrique Lores, said he formed the group last year with Shull at the helm to help get more partners behind the PC and print giant’s services push.

“We are going to be integrating our tools [and] integrating our programs, helping them to manage the full portfolio in a much easier way, which will help them to reduce their costs, will help them to capture more business and eventually will help them make more money,” Lores said.

What follows is an edited transcript of CRN’s deep-dive interview with Shull, who talked about the importance of Workforce Central to HP’s services push, how it fits in with HP’s expanding view of the hybrid employee experience, why it will have a “freemium” business model, whether HP will integrate third-party services into the toolbox and how the offering could expand in the future.