Many consider support services to be just about break/fix, but according to Scott Weller, SVP & GM of Technology Services Support for HP, it’s so much more than that for customers. At HP Discover early this month, he sat down with theCUBE hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante to talk about the use of support services in virtualization, hyper scale and hardware commoditization.

Virtualization Transition and Operation Assistance

Weller said that there are ultimately fewer and fewer physical moving parts. Drives will go away eventually, and break/fix will become a small part of support services. That said, Weller believes that one thing people are going to need is assistance with the journey to virtualization and help around the new technologies. Customers will also be concerned about preventing issues and will look to preempt them by using Big Data analytics.

Essentially, support services will be about aiding customers along their path to virtualization, and then helping them in operations.

Referring to Cloud as an example of new technologies gaining acceptance, Weller added, “People are doing it and really doing it. And, now, it’s sort of like customers are expecting that a company that is in the service business is going to be there as a partner to help them on the journey.”

Hyperscale and the Services Business

Vellante brought up the fact that hyperscale workers have a highly automated way of doing break/fix, adding that components eventually hit the shredder. He asked Weller to talk about how fast this is bleeding into the enterprise and what that means to the services business.

Weller began his response by saying that very large scale, tier one service providers are in the lead in terms of massive scale out and “have a very different philosophy of what it means to do support.” Tier two, below service providers and virtually the rest of the commercial industry are still looking at technologies, like rack, blade and Apollo, in addition to scale.

“So, essentially, I would say that the market is expanding. It’s not so much cannibalizing into the traditional market. It’s the fact that these new era, new style of IT companies are just expanding very quickly and that is a very different business model,” said Weller.

Support Service for Hardware Commoditization

Commodity hardware is another thing that has changed the support break/fix business. Weller said that people ultimately want products that don’t fail, and want to use support services to be proactive about that. In terms of hardware commoditization, he thinks that customers should think about the entirety of their system as there is still “all the layers of stuff on top of the gear itself that comprises a system.” He advised that customers want to ensure that all those components are aligned and up to date throughout the stack so that it doesn’t fail.

See Weller’s entire segment below:

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