HP talks up partner benefits of DaaS offering

HP exec talks through extended capabilities for its DaaS offering, which he claims is unlike any other on the market

HP says imbedding machine learning and an analytics platform into its device as-a-service (DaaS) offering will give partners a "unique" proposition to help develop their managed services capabilities.

Michael Park, HP's global head of emerging compute solutions, claims that HP's DaaS offering is not just a standard lease with a service packaged around it.

"It is financing and customer support but behind that is an extensive analytics backbone, which uses machine learning, that monitors all the information about the hardware itself such as, how is the CPU performing, is the Wi-Fi running properly, what is the memory store, the thermal dynamics, is the latest security policy running?

"And all that is fed into a telemetry backend where we write algorithms with a group of data scientists to identify performance patterns that help spot PC breakage before it occurs."

He added: "If partners tried to do all of this integration and device management individually they would bear a tremendous expense…My argument would be: why would partners want to go it alone on DaaS? Why not take your resources and build value-added services on top of HP DaaS, and we can scale the entire experience through the partner ecosystem?"

Park insisted that despite being behind other vendors such as Microsoft on the DaaS trend, for HP's partner base, it will be worth the wait as they find the ability to more efficiently manage their IT usage.

"It's a different approach. It's not just a procurement service," he said.

"This is a new kind of partnership that we need to build with our partners, as there are new skills and capabilities that are required in this new world to take care of the customer."

HP first launched its DaaS offering 18 months ago to service HP PCs, with 100 partners worldwide.

Park said this latest iteration - phase II - has been updated with channel partners in mind, and their need to work with multiple vendors.

HP DaaS is now available for Apple products in the US, a move that will be extended to Europe over the next couple of months.

"If you talk to a large enterprise, their main issue is that they have thousands of legacy applications written in a pre-Windows 10 world. So, as they're going to Windows 10 and their users are moving to iOS, they have a lot of complexity that they have to solve in custom app development and how to move that to the new world.

"It's creating a real manageability and security challenge for IT…Enterprises have to be pragmatic and we've responded to this by providing additional capability to our partners."

When asked what profile of partner he sees particularly benefiting from HP DaaS, Park said:

"People who are open to a cloud-based business model. Looking beyond vertical segments to size segments, I think that the corporate space is interesting because they're really resource constrained and willing to accept out-of-the-box solutions

One such suggestion being put forward by HP is a DaaS vending machine, as part of HP Tech Café Enhanced.

"This may sound silly to you but this vending machine has PCs and PC equipment and returning lockers…This allows firms to reduce the friction and speed up the experience of new employee or contactor on-boarding, without needing much IT involvement.

"For IT we're taking the work out of the job, and helping them to be more productive with the budgets they have."

"This was announced in February globally, and we're rolling this out…We think it's pretty interesting."