Today HP announced its new Always On Support offering, and IDC analyst Robert Brothers appeared on theCube to talk about the changing IT support landscape. Brothers discussed how converged infrastructure, the cloud and the need trend towards single points of contact (or single throats to choke) have changed the industry quite a bit – but support remains just as important even as support starts to disappear into the background in some instances.

Converged Infrastructure

Brothers says that the biggest change to the support world has been the shrinking number of silos. Before you had servers, storage, networking and software all in different silos all with different point people contacting different vendors for support. Converged infrastructure is changing that. There’s now usually a single point of contact at the data center, and that person also has their own single point of contact for support at a service provider. That person can’t actually support the entire infrastructure, but they can contact the right person for each device or piece of software.

The channels for support are also changing, Brothers says. Customers don’t want to go through the process of calling different numbers, explaining the problem again and again to different technicians and waiting on hold endlessly. Chat provides faster support, and forums and knowledge bases are providing customers with more self-service support. Both of these new channels also cut down the duplication of effort in terms of explaining issues and steps have already been taken.

On the subject of HP’s Project Voyager, the server automation platform we covered extensively earlier this year, Brothers says that the more you can keep people away from servers, the more uptime you will have. That’s an important aspect of the migration of servers to virtual or cloud environments where automation is the rule.

Brothers says that support will continue to become less visible. Enterprises may never have to contact support unless something on-premises is physically broken, otherwise, applications and virtual infrastructure delivered through the cloud will be handled behind the scenes. But those support roles won’t go away. In fact, things will stay very much the same at the hardware level, it’s just that the cloud providers will simply be making the same calls to vendors. Even at the software level, there will be many cases where a provider will spot problems and deal with resolutions entirely without the end customers interaction.

Brothers warns that customers will still want to maintain consistent SLAs across the board, and make sure support service providers have the qualifications to fully support your environment.

ServicesAngle

Brothers does a good job of breaking down the current issues in support and in the enterprise. The fundamentals of good support remain the same, but the channels for support, and where customers turn for support, are changing.