This more robust customer support platform, part of HP's Critical Advantage support program, is particularly important for enterprises with converged infrastructures of virtualized, non-virtualized and cloud computing, says Rob Brothers, director of hardware and software support services at IDC.
"Since storage, servers, networks and virtualization software are so intricately tied, it can be difficult to get to the root cause of a support issue. Hence, providing a customer with a 'one-throat-to-choke' solution through an offering like Critical Advantage is very appealing," Brothers said in an e-mail interview. HP's advantage in the support space is that it took all of the information that was in its IT resource center and added help desk functionality, he said.
However, HP's competitors are developing similar automated resources to provide prompt product and technical support to their customers. Dell and EMC have Web portals that have the same capabilities as HP's, Brother said. And Oracle has some fairly sophisticated tools around its knowledge base in which it suggests possible resolutions to customer problems before a technician reviews their case.
In addition, Cisco Systems technical support includes access to an online community of tens of thousands of experts that marshals the process of crowdsourcing to solve problems. Like Cisco's, HP's online community is made up HP and non-HP experts.
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