Wikibon’s Dave Vellante spoke with Vice President of Technology Services Lou Berger of HP at HP Discover 2012 (full video below). Vellante begins the conversation highlighting the importance of services to customers when they work with vendors, but noting that services aren’t marketed.

Berger points out that the service experience for a customer is life cycle. Since their customers have the ability to do many things on their own, he states that they come to HP because they bring something extra. The focus of service is on how the customer can best utilize the assets they purchase. They want to help customers move on to a converged infrastructure and then eventually move to the cloud.

Customers are used to buying support to the product purchased. Berger states that they looked back on their support portfolio in an effort to find a way to better give customers what they want. They simplified foundations and layered proactive services more geared towards their customers. The service was made more personalized and helped to move customers toward a converged infrastructure.

HP reoriented the top of their portfolio and began to look at what they called “datacenter care”. This allows customers to look at their full environment to make better assessments. It enables them to see better what they want and how they will approach changes in moving to converged and ultimately to the cloud.

The service cycle with HP starts with an assessment workshop they have with their customers. In these workshops they discuss what plans the customer has, their objectives, what business cases they want to solve, and how to approach it all. The pitfalls and limitations are also brought up at this time. Since this is a partnership they have with the customer, they seek to have the right individuals present so that all the important insights are had early on to ensure nothing is missed in the beginning. The workshop helps to reduce risk, ensure goals are hit, and to completely plan the project out. They want to have a seamless transition from workshop assessment to design to implementation.

In the end the customer’s main gauges of satisfaction with service hinge on the speed that the product can go to market within their enterprise, the financial savings, the simplification of their environments, and ultimately the meeting of their business needs.

You can watch the interview in its entirety below. See other great interviews from HP Discover on our YouTube channel.