With services becoming an even more massive opportunity, HP is making a series of changes designed to make it easier for partners to work with HP around the services play, which will include simplification to significantly reduce the number of SKUs.

With the opportunity in services around the PC, printer and collaboration solutions HP sells growing significantly, the company is redesigning its services strategy to improve the toolkit available to partners, and to make it easier for them to present a concise set of services options to their customers.

Dave Shull, President Workforce Services and Solutions at HP, noted a common question partners had about the HP services strategy.

“HP has been talking about services for years, and partners and customers ask me what’s gong to be different now,” Shull told partners during his keynote address Wednesday. “My commitment to you is that this isn’t changing. Everything we have to do from a services perspective has to be in our joint interest.”

Certainly, today’s environment for services is very different than the one when HP introduced their Managed Print Services [MPS] years ago.

“We are moving to a hybrid word in which people will be working from both home and office,” said Sumeer Chandra, SVP, Global Head and GM of Managed Services at HP. “It presents new and unique challenges that didn’t exist before, with customers looking to simplify infrastructure and focus on digital transformation.

On the other hand, the overall opportunity is much greater than before.

“We see it as a $150 billion market because of shift to a hybrid world,” Shull told partners. “We need to figure out how to seize it together, and crack the magic to make hybrid cloud amazing for customers with world class services.”

Shull noted that 83% of CEOs want a new digital strategy, but also noted that this was very much a skyscraper analogy, reflecting a general statement at the top.

“To make it happen, managing it all is the issue,” he said. “How we ensure employees are productive so CIOs can do the digital transformation.”

“HP with its portfolio of collaboration, print and infrastructure is unique,” Chandra said. “We have a way to put these pieces together in a unique way. This has allowed us to do things like repurposing our devices for our own new employees when supply chain shortages means we needed to sell the new ones. The employees don’t even know they get a used device.”

“HP has the broadest range of employee experience gear, and we should, with you, be able to win in this space,” Shull told partners. “But we can’t have the complexity we had historically. My first commitment to you is to drastically simplify our services offerings. It took us years to build them up, and it won’t take us years to get them simplified, but it will take months.”

Chandra said that reducing the huge number of services is more about reducing SKUs than it is about cutting vertical-specific or other custom offerings. This would entail ending 3 and 4 years SKUs for the same service, for example, or SKUs which add some extra features.

“It’s not about pruning core areas like government or health care services,” he said. “Partners shouldn’t see any significant loss in functionality.”

“We need to move beyond the building blocks and make sure we solve customer business needs,” Shull noted. “We also get we cant treat you all the same. One size cannot fit all. Some want only a small amount of support. Others want us to provide them with a complete DaaS solution.”

Shull discussed services that can be sold today that are core components of the tool box,

“One is how to solve the PC breaking problem where you solve the problem before it breaks, by using AI to see pattern issues,” he said. “We have dozens of sensors in laptops, printers and Poly gear to solve problems before they are a problem for the customer.

“I’m most excited about the fact that every device that HP has now has some sort of telemetry,” Shull added. “We had that in both HP and Poly before, but not on every single device.”

Shull said that U.K partner Total Computers UK uses this capability to improve the productivity of service delivery teams.

“They can have people in the field to address problems before they happen,” he said. “Both us and the partner make money and we have happier customers.”

Shull also pointed out how partners can leverage HP Anywhere, which uses technology acquired from Teradici (where the solution was called Teradici CAS). It is used for enterprise platform management, particularly in workstation environments.

“Our partner Briggs Automotive Company uses it to shorten lead time in manufacturing gear,” Shull indicated. “It can fit anywhere you have sold a commercial workstation. It’s a fresh way to start a hybrid workstation conversation.”

Extending device life as a service, something that HP could do earlier with printers, but not with PCs, where it was a difficult problem when HP addressed it 8 years ago, and wasn’t helped with bad timing, when most of these devices were managed on-prem, and many organizations had no business impetus to change their model.

“I have been surprised by the level of customer interest in extending the life of the device,” he said, “We have a Brazil partner who is extending both printers and PCs and it has been a selling point for them.”

Other changes in process include building the selling motion of the company around software, and pulling all services together into Workforce Central so you have one view of all the gear needed to be successful,” Shull stated. “For that, the right data model, set of APIs, and standardization has to happen, and we will roll this out over the next couple months.”

“We have a have a successful MPS business with the channel using a platform, and we are developing this similar platform that will include the PC side,” Chandra said. “The strategy is to create tools so partners can bud services on top of that. Our Active Care smart telemetry service helping partners because some partners don’t know how to sell software. This helps them sell software and support it.”

“We as a company have decades of experience working with the channel,” Shull said. “I’ll make mistakes and do things you wont like, but will also be transparent as we address this $150 billion opportunity.”