IDEAS Insights

We Know ‘ET Phone Home’. But What About ‘PC Phone Home’?

Dell recently announced upgrades to its ProSupport services focused around mobility offerings. My initial reaction was one of services for PCs, which are not critical to the enterprise's operation and hence outside of my area of interest.

But according to Dell more enterprises are equipping their employees with laptops. And with this trend, portions of the corporations' data are going mobile too. This presents some interesting challenges if laptops get lost or stolen. This world of heightened corporate governance and security puts a new perspective on these services and places them well and truly in the enterprise camp and so was worth further consideration.

One set of services that caught my eye were those to help track and recover laptops, and even remotely delete data, if a quick recovery is not an option and sensitive data is involved. GPS equipped Dell laptops with this service activated will work in a similar way to recovery services for cars, such as OnStar. The unit keeps track of its position via a GPS and can use the cellular network to call home and report its position. A signal can also be sent to the laptop to delete data, if required. Even non GPS capable laptops can call home. Whenever the lost or stolen laptop connects to the internet it can report in. Although without the GPS, it relies on data such as IP address, to be used in conjunction with good old policing, to track the unit down.

The technology is nothing new. It exists for cars and even cell phones, where for the latter, stolen units can be detected and disabled from the network. Therefore, the extension into computing is logical.

Dell generally does its homework and only tends to pursue opportunities it knows it has a good chance of doing volume business with.  And in the interests of balance, Dell is not the only company to offer such a service. These two factors indicate that this is a growing area of need in the industry.

Dell's New Global Service Offerings

Dell has retired its old "Enterprise Services" portfolio (Silver, Gold & Platinum Plus) as well as some others such as Business Helpdesk, Gold Technical Support, and Dell On Call and replaced them with a single new ProSupport offering. The announcement revolves around Dell's commercial support. Consumer support is not affected.

The announcement signals a broadening of Dell's enterprise-level support scope, a standardization of Dell's commercial services globally, and a lowering of the bar to access higher-end proactive services.

• Unlike the old Enterprise Support offerings that were focused on mid- to high-end servers and storage, ProSupport has been broadened to the desktop and even mobile products, for commercial users. This consolidation simplifies the relationships between Dell and its customers both at the contractual and support levels, where previous multiple contact points can now be rationalized.
• Dell is also using ProSupport to standardize its offerings worldwide. Prior to this announcement, users may have seen significant per-country variations in Dell's service portfolio.
• The re-packaging has allowed Dell to "lower-the-bar" to access some proactive services, previously the domain of Dell's high-end Platinum Plus offering, which was aimed at larger enterprises with around 100+ servers. With the relaxation of this minimum size "rule,"  smaller organisations can now get access to these higher-level services.

In many ways, key aspects of the services delivered (hardware maintenance, collaborative support, proactive services) haven't changed, and it is more about how Dell has changed its packaging and hence, its go- to-market strategy – including its now global consistency, which is different. This means that Dell doesn't have a major logistical task to reengineer itself in order to roll out these new products. As a result the worldwide rollout is expected to happen simultaneously with the US in EMEA and Asia Pacific. The similarity of features also means less disruption in terms of migrating clients from old to new service contracts.

Dell has announced two types of support, ProSupport for End Users and ProSupport for IT. The former is aimed at clients with little in-house expertise, while the latter is for the IT professional with a certain degree of expertise.

A brief overview of features and options for ProSupport are as follows:

ProSupport – Common Features

• Collaborative Support for Hardware and Software
• 24x7 Expert Center Phone and Online Support
• Escalation Management
• Next Business Day onsite support

ProSupport for End Users

• Virus and Spyware help
• Application Assistance (How To) on a focused group of products
• Getting Started Advice
• Remote Assistance – Dell technicians connecting directly to system to enhance the troubleshooting process.

ProSupport for IT

• FastTrack Dispatch via IT Professional Technical Training and Certification – allows qualified users to order their own replacement parts directly, bypassing Dell's telephone queues and hardware diagnosis procedures where the user is confident he/she knows what the problem is and what part is needed to fix it.

Options (applicable to either ProSupport for End User or ProSupport for IT)

• Mission Critical Option – faster onsite response and critical situation processes
• Enterprise Wide Contract – Dedicated Service Delivery Manager (SDM) , proactive planning and reporting
• Proactive Maintenance Option – Health check services
• Remote Advisory Options – remote assistance consultation including installation, configuration, and best practice recommendations
• Computrace Theft Recovery Service – Helps track and recover stolen notebooks and remotely deletes sensitive data
• CompleteCare Accidental Damage Service – Repairs or replaces accidentally damaged systems
• Keep Your Hard Drive – Enables users to control their sensitive data by retaining their hard drives

Products Included

ProSupport for End Users and IT is supported on Dell products aimed at the commercial marketplace and includes select: Dell PowerEdge, PowerVault, PowerConnect, Dell | EMC Enterprise Storage systems that are in a standard configuration, as well as OptiPlex, Precision, Latitude, Vostro computer systems and select Dell printers that are in a standard configuration.

What's Your Services Problem?

My conversations with industry executives in the services business show certain common threads of thought as to what they feel are the major meta-issues in the industry. They wonder and worry about how to address these issues, which I am sharing here with you, while increasing both their revenues and profit margins (no shock here with this requirement). Names are deleted to protect the innocent and naive.

1. To many, business process outsourcing is hitting a dead end, or at least much slower growth, due to the high (unpublicized in the main) failure rate of such arrangements and the fact that the customers are getting wise to this.The processes are not fully understood in the beginning, the people assigned to work on them are not sufficiently experienced, and the people provided are not good enough as domain experts. The end result is either increased costs, and/or dissatisfied clients.
2. Too many deals have been won by the outsourcer on the basis of a low bid rather than the right bid. They have ended up loosing money and trying to get out of the contract. There are some notable examples in this regard. Often, the customer tries to get out of the contract as things go very badly. It is profits that count, not just revenue. How to bid properly is still an open question and the firms that solve this problem will prevail in the end.
3. There is great debate within those firms who also provide hardware and software products along with their professional services as to what the right product mix should be. Too much in one direction turns potential customers off as they believe you have become more of a niche player in the de-emphasized space. There is also a great tradeoff in how executive time is spent and one or another sector suffers.
4. Growth is, in fact, stagnant, or barely increasing, notwithstanding the sounds of praise from certain circles. The major business issue for those firms with a heavy investment in services is how to raise this number (especially for the pure play service providers).
5. Customers are more and more discontent with those professional services firms that send in tens of thousands of pounds of young folks who bill out at a high rate per diem but who provide little value-add due to their lack of experience. Gurus in vertical sectors are hard to come by.
6. Offshore outsourcing is getting more and more of a bad name. Even though it is politically incorrect, certain firms are insisting that their work be outsourced only to certain locations. Trying to find out about this is liking trying to get a bank to talk about when its database security has been breached.
7. There are too many services-only firms competing for the same dollars. There needs to be a shake out in the industry.
8. Notwithstanding their claims of vendor neutrality, too many services firms are (privately) accused of favoring one hardware/software vendor over others due to conflicts of interest or hidden sweetheart deals.

While the above collection of worries, anecdotes and facts is based on personal conversations and was not gathered based on a scientific sample or analysis, the repetition of the comments among the folks who shared their time with me makes me believe there is a lot of truth to be found here.

The solution is another matter. There is a lot going on in the industry right now to address the above. These goings-on include relabeling and reorganizing, services consolidation, worldwide adjustments to service offerings so a uniform picture is presented to the potential customer, pricing reconciliation, the packaging of even custom services as much as possible (to the extent of SKU numbers), closer packaging of services and tangible products (e.g., hardware), new managers, and a search for new processes and best practices to deliver services. Whether these attempts to improve will result in fundamental change remains to be seen. Can services really be productized?

Share your views with me and maybe see your name (if you wish) in genuine blog print.

HP Opts for Voodoo for Growth in Services, Hardware and More

Voodoo Computers sells high-end gaming machines that go for $6000 US and more. Realizing the clear potential of gaming as a growth market, HP will acquire Voodoo and form a separate business unit with it in the HP Personal Systems Group. Running the hotest gaming technology around (literally and figuratively), Voodoo’s latest offering (Omen) sports a water-cooled Intel Core 2 Duo processor.

HP people say that HP intends to become a leader in the gaming market with the Voodoo acquisition. It is true HP already provides workstations for game development and powering online game services.

But, there is much more to do. HP (along with everyone else in the gaming industry) faces a major challenge in providing the service and support high end gamers need. Gamers spend lots of money on gear for their hobby/passion/fetish and are most demanding when something goes wrong. They typically engage in high powered tournament play (with dozens and even hundreds of other gamers) on the internet in real time and normal “call and listen to music” support with mulitple menu choices does not do the job for them.

Gamers need technical support that they can reach while they are playing. They also need technical support from people who truly know the ins-and-outs of the game being played. Finally, and most importantly, they need technical support from people able to get into the innards of the game from their suppport computer, while it is being played, and who can see, in real time, what the issue is.

Of course, such technical support capabilities would be of use not only in the gaming environment, but also in the IT enivironment in general. In most cases, complex application program users can only currently dream of technical support that can get into the context of an application from a remote site and interactively work with a given user, or users, to solve a problem. Some internet games are as complex, or more so, than IT applications

IBM has already recognized this as an issue for both gaming and IT applications. As a result, it is developing a complex architecture based on VOIP and a clever connection of interconnected servers at the support site, as well as other WAN technologies to address support for gaming (which is particularly  popular in the Japan-Asia-Pacific market).

The technical support infrastructure supporting online games differs from that of conventional games. These differences include the critical role of network bandwidth and latency and the use of architectures supporting distributed applications and high-performance parallel processing. The work is being done in the IBM Beijing Research Laboratories. Preliminary results are promising showing a decreased user response time, increased user satisfaction, and more call capability per hour.It sees clear to me that the IBM approach, or variations thereof, for a context-aware, smart call center will be used worldwide not only for gaming but to improve call center capabilities for conventional IT applications. 

In other words, I see the rapid development of truly interactive gaming support as a catalyst to providing the same degree of support for IT applications. Just like the gaming market has, for example, driven the market for high end graphics, overclocking, ever “hotter” processors, and the most powerful personal machines, it will drive the market for truly interactive service due to its sheer volume and rapid growth.Its another example of the consumer horse leading the IT cart, this time in services.

More Open Source in Your Stack? No Subscription Support Problem

Linux vendors make their living by providing support services through subscription fees. I find it comforting, and certainly, developers and users do also, that, so far at least, there seems to be no limit to what these vendors are able to do in the way of supplying support for software stack components that are not at all like the original Linux kernel. Let's look at Red hat, for example:

Red Hat  acquired JBoss earlier this year. And now, to no one's surprise, it has added the JBoss Application Server (geared to Java applications) to its supported stack. (Note the basis change from Linux to Java - not a small step and fraught with programming and support issues for the developer and user as well as Red Hat). The stack now includes Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the JBoss Application Server, Hibernate database-access software, and the Tomcat web application server. The Red Hat stack also includes open source database MySQL, and will work with open-source database PostgreSQL (not included).

I suspect the supported stack will grow even more when other JBoss middleware (portal, messaging, and transaction server) is ready and fully tested with the stack. For good measure, Red Hat also supports another open-source application server, Jonas, from the French consortium ObjectWeb. I also suspect that more open source Java-based tools and middleware will enter the stack including some from BEA.

Red Hat continues to be aggressive in its stack offerings and is clearly willing to take on more and more subscription-based support responsibilities while mixing Linux and Java. Does anyone still argue that the subscription-based open source support model is not viable? Is Red Hat going to bite off more than it can chew? Tell me your views. More information is available here, here, here, and here.  If you really feel ambitious, how about a rant about stack lock-in and the associated support issues when you want to change a component?