HP helps users meld business with IT

Hewlett-Packard will unveil next week a two-pronged effort to help enterprise customers reduce operational costs by rapidly synchronizing business needs with IT purchasing.

As part of the effort, HP will launch its eBusiness, Customer, and Sales Operations (ECO) organization to bring under one roof activities such as pre- and post-sales support and product support. The company will also unveil HP.com Business to Business, a revamped extranet site for enterprise customers.

Because HP offers diverse product lines across the enterprise -- including servers, desktops, notebooks, handhelds, printer, and faxes -- the need to synchronize buying information has become critical to HP customers interested in containing costs.

Senior Vice President Olivier Kohler has been announced as the leader of worldwide ECO at HP.

"We regrouped all the functions that touch customers in one organization," Kohler said, adding that the goal is to help customers synchronize business and IT in order to capitalize on a changing business environment.

To that end, the HP.com Business to Business extranet will give HP enterprise customers global visibility into catalogs, purchasing, and order status, allowing them to procure products across multiple HP regions from a single site. Catalog data will be personalized by industry and customer profile, as will the extranet, which will include account-specific content.  

An opt-in component will also allow HP to monitor and analyze in real time customers' activities on the Web site, giving HP the ability to link what is happening in support with what is happening in terms of purchasing, for example. 

Marty Gruhn, program director of the Site IQ Web best practices group at Summit Strategies, called the new capabilities "e-commerce on steroids" and was impressed with what she saw of the new unified capabilities.

"It's more than just ordering online. HP will give its customers access to lots of relationship class assets like managing software licenses digitally, inventory and asset management, billing and invoice facilities online," Gruhn said.

According to HP's Kohler, ECO will also reduce HP's operational costs by streamlining the company's ability to serve customers. HP's efforts at consolidation will help "normalize" the number of calls into HP call centers by giving customers "global consistency," Kohler said.

"When the Sasser virus hit, we were able to have a site that explained what our customers could expect across the world. It was translated and gave the enterprise the same capabilities in 69 languages and 102 counties," Kohler said, adding that this global consistency significantly reduced the number of support calls.

Perhaps stealing a page from Dell's knowledge management book, HP will also offer a central repository of information that can be accessed globally.

Kohler explained that HP's focus is not on the competition as much as it is on listening to customers at advisory councils, designing new processes in response to customer demand, and delivering changes in a short period of time. He also said, however, "Everything we do is from a competitive perspective."

The changes at HP in part at least are being driven by changes in the marketplace, according to Peter Kastner, executive vice president and chief research officer of Aberdeen Group.

"While HP sells a lot of commodity products, the new organization comes from the realization that commodity prices alone do not make a leadership company. It is how you service all of your customer needs," Kastner said.