Devices-as-a-Service, or DaaS, has been a mess for decades during which the buyer of the service wanted one thing that providers were absolutely unwilling to provide. What buyers wanted was a service without the risks of having to pay a massive fee if they canceled, but hardware OEMs have been unwilling to take the related hardware risk. But DaaS always seemed like part of a solution because you needed more than just the device. You needed all of the support elements needed to manage these devices.
HP took a look at this and found the entire approach wanting, and I agree. It really didn’t make much sense for either the customer or the provider unless you bundled the devices with the services necessary to manage and assure them.
So, HP came up with HP Managed Solutions under its HP Workforce Solutions umbrella, and it is brilliant. Let me explain.
Why Separating Devices and Services Makes No Sense
I’m working on a real estate project at the moment in which one of the problems is that we can’t get insurance for part of it because no insurance company is willing to take unbounded risk. So, we had to bound the risk first, meaning we had to identify what could go wrong and the potential costs of that so the insurance company could take that cost against the risk of it occurring and come up with a fee.
With a typical DaaS approach, the problem with OEMs is they didn’t want to take on unbounded risk. If on month two the customer said this isn’t working out so take back all the hardware, the vendor would eat that cost. Because the vendor might not be overseeing the deployment, maintenance or support, the risk was exceedingly high that things could go very wrong.
However, if the vendor owns the deployment, maintenance, and support for the hardware, they have some control over how this hardware is used, how it is supported, and have intimate knowledge of what is going right and wrong. So, while they still have hardware risk, they can mitigate that risk by assuring the deployment outcome. Since HP has a ton more experience doing hardware deployments than any IT shop is ever likely to have, it can better assure a positive outcome.
Additional Benefits
In addition, HP is a global company with a company-in-a-company in terms of Wolfe Security. In the recent Cloud Strike failure, HP was aware of it when it broke in Japan and was thus able to prevent much of the damage that occurred in the U.S. because it was able to get ahead of it based on what it learned in Japan.
HP is also able to get worker telemetry, and, based on that, can see where users are struggling or having difficulties. Even before a user calls in with a problem, HP can begin to diagnose and mitigate that problem and often complete the mitigation before the user is upset enough to call.
One of the biggest problems HP discovered in many companies is undisciplined change management that can result in massive breakage and downtime. By using well researched, tried-and-true practices developed over decades, HP can assure that breakage due to changes is eliminated. So, one of the biggest problems with personal technology at scale isn’t at sites using HP’s Managed Solutions.
Wrapping Up: DaaS Is Dead. Long Live Managed PC Services
DaaS made sense when we had mainframes and terminals, but the reason it made sense was because IBM fully managed both which is what made that work. Current DaaS offerings leave off much of the service component making the result inefficient and the OEMs unwilling to provide the service that customers seemed to want.
HP took a look at this and came up with HP Managed Services which provides the benefits of DaaS with far fewer risks to the vendor and a far higher quality level for the buyer, resulting in a near perfect offering of hardware and services very similar to what IBM once provided with mainframes and terminals.
Sometimes, when looking for the best answer to a current problem, the past can be informative, and that is the case here. And this service was designed to address both local and remote employees.
