Hewlett-Packard Co. is expanding its suite of premium PC support services that was reserved for its biggest customers to include mid-sized and large enterprises as well – but it won’t yet be sold through the channel.
According to a report by Howard Solomon in IT World Canada, HP Priority Services are be available to organizations with a minimum number of Hewlett-Packard tablets, desktops, thin clients, laptops or point of sale devices under warranty with the goal of aiding in-house support staff if they’ve run out of ideas for solving a problem.
Two support offerings are available under the Priority Services banner:
— Priority Access, for organizations with at least 250 devices, offers round the clock access to highly-skilled technicians. They don’t do basic triage — that’s expected to be done by the in-house help desk. These technicians want to know what the symptoms of the problem are and what the help desk thinks the issue is. If that’s reasonable, the HP tech will expedite the solution.
— Priority Management, for organizations with at least 1,000 devices, includes all services of Priority Access plus assigns a global support manager who will part of the HP customer’s account team. This person’s job will be to create a tailored support plan for the organization, proactively looking for issues and collecting performance reports.
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The HP-provided support services could be viewed as competitive by some HP partners with a services practice. And Priority Services are not yet available for HP partners that don’t want to build a services play to sell to their clients. In a statement provided to CDN, Alan Buckner, program manager for global accounts support and services with HP, indicated that will change soon.
“Our intent is to offer Priority Services for sale by both HP and its partners. Today, Priority Services is optimized for HP direct sales. We are currently developing optimizations to enable partners to also sell these services because this will represent a huge opportunity for them,” said Buckner. “ How? Most partners are limited to selling services to one country or region. With HP Priority Services being a global offering, they will be able to sell these services which cover a company’s HP PC install base in 60+ countries around the world.”