Hewlett-Packard Co. today unveiled enhanced support services that it said will enable its hardware customers running SAP applications to more efficiently respond to some support problems and prevent others.
The key element in HP’s new HP Mission Critical Services Enhancements for SAP offering is integration between the applications that shared SAP/HP customers use to report, respond to, and track service incidents. The two companies have created a new integration between SAP’s Solution Manager, used to facilitate technical support for SAP applications, and HP’s Insight Remote Support software, used to monitor and respond to technical issues on HP hardware and software.
The integration means that users of SAP applications and HP hardware can report a support issue using SAP’s Solution Manager, and the issue will also be reported automatically to HP support engineers through Insight Report Support.
“Previously, we had two separate work streams for addressing technical support issues,” said Gerry Nolan, HP’s director of worldwide Mission Critical Services in an interview with Managing Automation. “There was no automated handoff, so a lot of work had to be done manually.”
The increased integration and automation, he said, will allow SAP and HP to respond more quickly and in a more coordinated fashion to customers’ technical support issues. The integration is a standard part of HP’s existing Mission Critical Services Enhancement for SAP offering, under which customers can choose maximum service-level agreements that promise corrective action within four hours of a reported technical support incident.
HP also announced several other enhancements to its support offering for SAP users that, among other things, will allow customers to better monitor and meter the use within their organization of HP and SAP hardware and software resources.
HP’s enhanced support offerings could affect a broad swath of enterprise users of SAP applications. Forty-five percent of all SAP sites — 67,000 in total — run their SAP applications on HP hardware, Nolan said.
In addition to integrating its tech support application with SAP’s, HP unveiled several new support offerings specifically for users of SAP applications. The HP Application Performance Standards Meter Service is a Web-based service that can be used to measure and analyze hardware resource consumption of SAP systems. The Meter Service is designed for systems running SAP applications in virtualized infrastructures, and can be used by customers, for example, to bill different departments or functions within their enterprise according to their utilization of hardware and software resources.
Other new offerings include an annual capacity planning service and a storage performance analysis service. Like the Meter Service, these offerings carry an additional charge over and above upgraded Mission Critical Service Enhancement for SAP coverage, Nolan said. Pricing for these services varies based on customer requirements, and ranges from $10,000 to more than $1 million, he said. The enhanced support offerings for SAP are currently available globally.
HP has not yet rolled out enhanced technical support offerings for other major enterprise application environments, such as Oracle, Microsoft, or Infor, but “there are a lot of discussions going on with those companies,” Nolan said.