Rethinking Support for Hybrid IT: An Inclusive, Relationship-Based, Tailored Approach

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_empty_space][vc_column_text]Hybrid IT is a “both-and” world. IT leaders think in terms of both on-premises infrastructure and cloud. They focus on keeping the data center operating smoothly at high levels of availability and at the same time reducing costs. They’re looking for ways to get more value out of their current IT investments and carve out infrastructure for innovative business services.

Successful digital transformations are built around this kind of flexible, inclusive, “both-x-and-y” thinking. When it comes to support for hybrid IT, though, the marketplace hasn’t kept pace, and IT organizations often find themselves limited to an “x-only” experience by their vendors’ offerings. The “x” is, of course, the traditional break/fix approach – which may be perfectly adequate for businesses that just need some help with their keep-the-lights-on needs. But for other companies, there’s a pressing need for a solution that encompasses both those needs and the other crucial dimensions of today’s hybrid environments.

At HPE, we’ve understood that hybrid IT calls for a new kind of support services for years – actually since before we launched HPE Datacenter Care back in 2013. Since then we’ve constantly added capabilities and honed the offer to create what we think is the most comprehensive support service in the market today.

Here’s a quick overview of HPE Datacenter Care:

The Core

1. Reactive Support. We troubleshoot, monitor, and remediate devices across your infrastructure to reduce the number of issues and resolve problems as they occur. Like all of the other components of HPE Datacenter Care, Reactive Support covers your entire IT environment, including non-HPE equipment.
2. Relationship Management. An account support team, including local and remote team members, gives you a single point of accountability. A local, assigned Account Support Manager develops full knowledge of your business goals as well as your IT environment, and partners with your IT team to deliver insights on best practices, processes, and technologies. This is true relationship-based support that accelerates your business in ways that break/fix can’t.
3. Enhanced Call Management. Special call routing gives you fast access to HPE’s Advanced Solution Center team and experts in environment-level issues, as well as specialist teams or Centers of Excellence for expertise areas such as Servers, Storage, VMware, Microsoft, SAP, and RedHat.
4. Proactive Options. Now we add to the solution stack your choice of proactive capabilities, depending on the type of products covered – for example, you can select Server, Storage and SAN, or Network proactive options.

The Building Blocks

HPE understands that every datacenter is different, because every business is different, with its own strategies and objectives. In a sense, your current environment already embodies your business goals, and a generic support solution that fails to take that into account isn’t going to cut it. So HPE Datacenter Care includes specialized capabilities to fit your environment. A good way to think of these is as building blocks that provide a tailored support experience. They cover specific technologies in your infrastructure, yet because they’re standardized, they keep costs low.

Let’s say you just deployed SAP HANA TDI. We can provide solution support with HPE Datacenter Care for SAP HAA TDI with access to specialists and the SAP HANA CoE. Or you use Microsoft Azure Stack or Hyperscale compute? Sure, we can do all of that and more. Other building blocks include HPE OneSphere, Storage, Networking, Multivendor, HPE NonStop, and NFV

Other HPE Deliverables. We can further tailor the solution to your organization’s unique needs with special options such as HPE GreenLake Flex Capacity, our innovative consumption-based IT model that combines on-premises infrastructure with cloud-like agility and economics.

Proof of (Part of) the Pudding

So what kind of impact can HPE Datacenter Care have? A new white paper from IDC (The Business Value of HPE Datacenter Care) looked at that question in some detail, based on data gathered from companies currently using the service, and came up with actual estimated dollar amounts. One result that caught my eye: these businesses reduced their revenue losses due to unplanned outages by around two-thirds on average (see the figure).

And this is just one of some truly eye-opening figures in the study. Now, no question, these are impressive results. But they’re just part of the picture, and maybe not the biggest part. Operational savings are one thing, but what if it turns out that an IT team, freed from the time pressures of dealing with unplanned outages, was able to develop a bunch of new apps that made life easier for in-house users? Or an innovative online platform that brought in a flood of new customers?

Hard to put a dollar amount on that.

Check out this great report on how HPE Datacenter Care helped human capital services giant ADP speed time-to-market without compromising stability and performance.

And read here how HPE Datacenter Care helped The Prince’s Trust, a U.K. charity, save time and money.

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