HP is seeing hundreds of millions of dollars in sales pipeline for device as a service and is pulling together a channel offering to capitalise on the growing market opportunity.
Ron Coughlin, president of HP's personal systems business, said in an interview with CRN USA that more than 40 percent of companies are actively considering moving to device-as-a-service.
"We see it as a tremendous opportunity, and in fact, the demand is ahead of what we expected at this stage, and we are building capability to catch up with that," he said. "Device-as-a-service is scaling rapidly."
The device-as-a-service contractual relationship allows customers struggling to manage the wide range of devices being used by employees to move to a single subscription contract with monthly payments for devices based on the number of users in an organisation.
Unlike HP managed print services, which started as a direct sales offering, HP device-as-a-service is being built from the ground up as a channel program, said Coughlin. "We see the primary play here as through the channel," he said.
Coughlin and his team, in fact, were meeting with channel partners at the first ever Americas Executive Commercial Forum at the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix this week to develop the device-as-a-service channel program.
Bill Avey, the worldwide vice president and general manager of support services at HP who developed HP's managed print services offering, is leading the device-as-a-service offensive.
Coughlin encouraged partners to work directly with HP to develop the program. "Engage now because we are still shaping the program," he said. "Partners get to shape what it looks like."
Coughlin also urged partners to start discussing device-as-a-service contractual relationships with customers and to work with HP to close those deals now. "We have solutions today," he said.
In fact, HP has already won device-as-a-service deals with a number of companies including Siemens and The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf.
HP will have a flexible device-as-a-service offering with a "menu approach" that allows partners to customise the program, said Coughlin. "Some might take the HP offer top to bottom, similar to channel [managed print services] and others might take a piece of the HP offering and marry it with their own," he said.
The device-as-a-service includes everything from mobile devices and tablets to PCs to workstation and retail point-of-sale systems.
The HP device-as-a-service initiative opens the door for partners to layer on significant value-added services including analytics around the devices, said Michael Park, HP vice president and general manager of mobility. "We are creating an entirely new market segment," he said.
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