BILL AVERY Q&A
DEVICE AS A SERVICE
Whether a large business or a small medium enterprise the fleet of office equipment
has only grown in value, and with that, the necessity of device management solutions.
TBT spoke to Bill Avery, general manager and global head of personal systems at
HP about the benefits of Device-as-a-Service (DaaS) programs.
TBT: What do Device as a Service
programs provide partners?
BA: There are three main components to
HP DaaS: The Device, life cycle services
and an application that provides
analytics and productive management;
for us that’s TechPulse. We can wrap
around lifecycle services, insights and
analytics around PCs, notebooks and
desktops and any other hardware a
business may need.
TBT: What are lifecycle services?
BA: Lifecycle service allow businesses
to have a specific settings that are
appropriate for their enterprise and
typically there will be a physical asset
tag or an electronic asset tag applied to
the machine. You can also have a break
fix strategy so that businesses have
an effective method to get device that
break up and running.
TBT: Why are these services necessary?
When a device ships, it’s ready to run,
but it’s really not business ready which
is why we wrap these services around it.
At the end of life, there is asset recovery,
data sanitization and the reuse of that
device to think about. Ideally, devices
go out for a second life but when that is
not possible, individual parts within the
machine can be recycled and reused.
TBT: How can the applications
help a business?
BA: TechPulse sits on all devices
managed by HP DaaS and feeds data
back to HP so we can improve the end
user experience. For example, a hard
drive failure is typically treated as a
catastrophic event. Your data is gone
and hope you have a backup but even if
it does work out well, it’s still a miserable
experience. Hard drive failures are very
predictable with telemetry and machine
learning. We know 30 to 60 days in
advance when a hard drive is going
to go down so we can reach out to the
end user, we can explain to them the
“DaaS provides value for the customer in the insights and
analytics, helping them optimise their software and spend.
Customers can see where they are over purchasing and can
afford to buy down.”
situation, tell them how to have a high
quality back up and fix the drive.
TBT: How can DaaS programs
save money?
BA: With TechPulse telemetry we can start
looking at the fleet. I’ll use myself as an
example: I have a thin and light device
which is appropriate because I travel a lot
but I also have a core i7 which is totally and
completely unnecessary because I look at
PowerPoint slides and I read emails which
doesn’t require processing power.
We also have a lot of customers who
find that they are over provisioned
on licences. Especially in a multigenerational
workforce where older
workers use Office and younger
workers use Google docs. You may be
over paying one provider whilst under
paying another out of compliance.
TBT: What’s the advantage of the
‘-as-a-Service’ model?
BA: DaaS provides value for the
customer in the insights and analytics,
helping them optimise their software
and spend. Customers can see where
they are over purchasing and can
afford to buy down. There is value for
them and there is value for the vendor
and that trusted advisor relationship
earns us credibility for a long time.
TBT: What is your assessment of
the ‘-as-a-Service’ market in the
channel?
BA: Adoption right now is less that
10 per cent but it’s a market that will
flip over time. Folks are moving to
an ‘as-a-service’ world, so they do
say to us ‘do you have something in
a subscription type model’. Research
says about 20 percent of IT buyers are
interested in a subscription model but
the demographic of those people are
changing and we expect DaaS to grow
in time.
April 2019 www.technologybusinesstoday.com 33
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