HP Imagine: HP Highlights Managed Services in Product Reveals

HP IMAGINE — HP’s Workforce Solutions division has previewed a host of new products to help organizations monitor and manage their IT environments.

The company provided the first look at its annual product showcase and leadership conference, HP Imagine.

John Gordon, president and general manager, HP Managed Solutions, spoke to Channel Futures at the event in Palo Alto, California. He said HP wants to develop more solutions to help partners grow their managed services businesses.

“More customers are looking for someone to take these types of services over," said Gordon. "Our channel partners want to add more services and software into this mix; they’re usually higher margin. Frequently they’re recurring revenue. They give you a reason to stay engaged, and they can help you find other jumping off points.”

Gordon also said its often difficult for partners to transition to managed services due to the upfront investments involved.

HP's John Gordon

“A lot of what I hope you saw today, and what we’re doing in this Workforce Solutions area, we want to help partners participate in the MSP business model without having to go through all the MSP [investment]," said Gordon.

The exec also said HP wants to “help change our channel’s relationships with their customers."

Related:HP Imagine: AI PCs in the Spotlight

“They have such powerful relationships that they’re so valuable to us. But we want to help expand their relationships, from selling great HP products to being able to help their customers make their workforce more productive, more fulfilled. So what you’ll see from us is trying to go after the things that are probably either too capital-intensive or big for the channel partners to be able to develop individually. Some big partners can develop things, but you’ll see HP trying to give them the capabilities they can use to get into growth areas.”

HP Workforce Experience Platform Expands Beta Access and Introduces New Features

HP’s Workforce Experience Platform has been in private beta for three months, with more than 270,000 devices enrolled. The platform intelligently anticipates and resolves digital friction across employee endpoints from a single dashboard.

HP is now making the Workforce Experience Platform Beta available to new or renewing HP Proactive Insights customers in the United States at no extra cost.

The vendor is also rolling out new features that enable customers to monitor, secure and manage printer performance, in addition to PCs. It said new capabilities in AI-powered fleet management and employee sentiment analysis will help reduce IT support tickets and employee downtime through proactive anomaly detection and smart recommendations.

Related:HP Imagine: HP CEO Pitches AI as Solution to Employee Frustration

Additionally, HP Workforce Experience Platform supports integrations with Microsoft Power BI, Power Automate and Tableau. It also plans to support Microsoft Intune and ServiceNow in a future release. HP said this means IT has a more holistic view of its device fleet, better data accuracy, and more tailored IT operations that help drive down expenses and improve return on investment.

‘Industry First’ Out-of-Band Diagnostics and Remediation

Elsewhere, HP is introducing a new HP out-of-band remediation service. It enables IT teams to remotely fix more PC issues, even if the PC won’t boot. HP said it is the first PC manufacturer to use out-of-band technology to securely connect to remote PCs below the OS, using an encrypted cloud connection. This allows HP support agents full keyboard, video and mouse (KVM) control to diagnose and fix more complex issues like boot failures, imaging and BIOS issues, “with virtually no assistance from the end user.”

HP says it's making the Workforce Experience Platform Beta available to new or renewing HP Proactive Insights customers in the U.S. at no extra cost. Photo courtesy: HP

Look for the service to be available later this year in North America and the EU as an add-on to an HP Essential, Premium or Premium+ Support package with the purchase of any new Intel vPro-enabled PC directly from HP or a channel partner. HP plans to expand the service feature availability across other commercial PCs in the coming months.

New AI Advisory Services

The company is also rolling out a new AI advisory service to help customers tap into the potential of Microsoft 365 Copilot. This new AI advisory service will evaluate a company’s current setup and readiness for AI, conduct interactive workshops, and help companies plan for rolling out new AI tools. Expect the service to be available in November in the U.S., U.K., France, Spain, Ireland and Germany.