IT has never exactly been a sedate, “business-as-usual” kind of a field – things have always moved fast, and keeping up takes a strenuous effort. But in the past few years the pace has been truly relentless. Companies find themselves having to manage their traditional infrastructure and apps while at the same time creating and brokering entirely new services at a rapid clip. They’re being asked not just to store and protect data, but to turn it into real-time insights and business value. They’re looking for ways not just to react to changes in the tech landscape, but to deliver continuously on innovations that leverage today’s agile, mobile-ready, hybrid environments.
So it’s not surprising that many businesses are looking for a helping hand with their digital transformation. IT leaders tell us they want to free up time for their teams to tackle new projects, and/or they want to access deep skills on an as-needed basis when they don’t have the right expertise in-house.
Traditionally, management services providers have offered two options, neither of them totally satisfactory. You could go the out-tasking route, handing off specific IT processes to a third-party provider. You retain overall control of your IT strategy and you get the benefit of the provider’s tools and practices, but you’re pretty much restricted to the operational level. Or you could go for full-blown outsourcing, and transfer management and execution of the IT function to an external provider. You can tie your SLAs to business outcomes, but you’ve now handed over end-to-end responsibility for IT control and strategy as well as ongoing operations.
Services Across the Transformation Spectrum
But what if you could get help with more than just basic operations, and also keep control over your IT strategy so you can continue to improve and accelerate? What if you could hand off the workloads you choose to a trusted partner that can also help you power your digital transformation? Because the reality is, there’s a huge swath of territory between out-tasking and outsourcing, and for many businesses the sweet spot – the point where management services can make the biggest contribution – lies somewhere within that zone.
Adaptive Management Services, from HPE Pointnext, is a new approach that enables you to manage and operate your environment in the way you want, keeping your business operating at peak performance while also accelerating your digital transformation. It covers the entire workload stack to help you drive efficiencies and squeeze costs. We don’t stop at the infrastructure and O/S layers, as many current offerings in the market do; we cover the middleware and application layers as well, for hybrid, on-prem and Edge environments (see the figure below).
Adaptive Management Services (see the solution brochure here) provide tactical improvements through a full range of monitor, operate and admin services, delivered via HPE Remote Monitoring and Management. But what really sets this offering apart is the strategic improvements you can achieve through our Advise and Optimize service, which delivers a Master level of skills to enhance and extend your IT capabilities. We provide experts, either as shared or assigned resources, who can deliver continuous improvement based on the Plan, Do, Check and Act (PDCA) methodology. They can meet with you, for example, on a monthly basis to provide recommendations and advice.
HPE can provide that next-gen expertise for every technology that we service through Adaptive Management Services, whether it’s storage, cloud, databases, mobility, SAP workloads … it’s a long, long list! And we ensure that allowances are built into the contract that enable you to build out improvements and enhancements without having to go back and do change orders.
Flex to the Max
It all adds up to another big differentiator for HPE Adaptive Management Services: flexibility. If you need help to cover a second shift, HPE can do that, and we can do it worldwide. Or if you want to supplement your teams’ expertise within a specialist area like big data, we can do that too. We can support your HPE infrastructure or third-party equipment, whether it’s legacy or next-gen technologies. And we can tailor your contract terms to meet your specific IT and business needs, for whatever duration you need, whether it’s six months, two years, or indefinitely.
For a great example of the power of that flexibility, read how HPE helped Dansk Supermarked Group, Denmark’s largest grocer, harness big data to unleash growth, competitive agility and customer insight. The retailer turned to HPE Pointnext for a mix of consulting and support services for its end-to-end SAP HANA solution, leveraging HPE experts as an extension of its IT team. Dansk also leveraged HPE GreenLake Flex Capacity as the pay-as-you-go platform for the SAP in-memory compute solution. The results included 30% - 40% faster point-of-sale reporting and 200 staff hours a day saved, freeing up staff for more valuable activities.
Learn more about HPE Adaptive Management Services and how HPE Pointnext can help you innovate and gain competitive advantage.
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Frank_Palacios
Adaptive Management Services, WW Services Product Management, HPE Pointnext
