‘We’re All In’ On The Hybrid Employee Experience
HP Inc. executive Dave Shull has vowed to “make it easy” for partners to drive revenue through services around the hybrid employee experience, calling it a “significant growth opportunity” for the channel.
In an exclusive interview with CRN, Shull, the former Poly CEO who is now president of HP’s Workforce Services and Solutions group, said the main way the Palo Alto, Calif.-based vendor plans to do this is through Workforce Central, a “toolbox” arriving this summer that will consolidate more than 64 of HP’s existing services for PCs, printers and other devices into a single cloud-based dashboard. Workforce Central will also let partners integrate the services into their own systems.
[Related: HP Ushers ‘Next Era of Hybrid Work’ With New Laptops And Solutions]
Shull revealed Workforce Central to partners at HP’s Amplify Partner Conference last month, saying it will turn them into “virtual CIOs” for their customers and create new upsell opportunities.
“This is an HP strategic initiative to say we are all in on solving this space as a corporation because we think we have a really unique set of assets in terms of the gear that we offer: PCs, printers and collaboration. No one else offers that. And so let’s seize that opportunity,” he said.
“And we can do something that a pure software company can’t do because we actually have the telemetry in the devices,” Shull added. “We have dozens of sensors in some of our PCs. How do we make the most of that to provide unique insights that a pure software company is not capable of doing? And so strategically, we’re all in on capturing this employee experience space.”
HP’s Workforce Services and Solutions group is currently a $4 billion business, most of which comes from the vendor’s managed print services and Device-as-a-Service offerings. In a recent interview for CRN’s April cover story about HP, the company’s CEO, Enrique Lores, said he formed the group last year with Shull at the helm to help get more partners behind the PC and print giant’s services push.
“We are going to be integrating our tools [and] integrating our programs, helping them to manage the full portfolio in a much easier way, which will help them to reduce their costs, will help them to capture more business and eventually will help them make more money,” Lores said.
What follows is an edited transcript of CRN’s deep-dive interview with Shull, who talked about the importance of Workforce Central to HP’s services push, how it fits in with HP’s expanding view of the hybrid employee experience, why it will have a “freemium” business model, whether HP will integrate third-party services into the toolbox and how the offering could expand in the future.
How central is Workforce Central to HP’s Workforce Services and Solutions business?
Let me hit a couple of things. First of all, workforce versus workplace. A lot of people talk about workplace, and we’re intentionally talking about workforce here instead of workplace because we really think the employee is the center of the equation. So that reflects actually a fair amount of internal debate, but I think I want to be very focused on the employee experience at the workplace.
Two: This only works if we can really provide a unified view across every aspect of the employee experience, whether it’s a PC or printer or trying to get on a Zoom call the way you just did. Every aspect of that employee journey is really important, so Workforce Central is a core piece of that.
Now, there’s a lot of work that underlies Workforce Central. There are 64 different services. They all have to be pulled together. The data has to be analyzed. The AI has to be deployed, so this will be an evolutionary product. But to answer your question directly: Workforce Central is very central to our Workforce Services business.
Is Workforce Central a paid offering?
I’m a huge fan of what I would call a ‘freemium’ model, which comes from my media background as well, where there’s base functionality that I believe every single customer should have. I believe every single HP device should have telemetry enabled. I believe every single customer of ours should have some basic insights into their fleet. But obviously, there are some aspects of the insights that we provide with the services we provide that cost us more. And so I think you’ll see a model that has some upcharge options depending on the level of service or capabilities.
For the paid options, will that come in the form of a monthly SaaS subscription?
I think to be determined. More to come.
When you said 64-plus services will be accessible within Workforce Central, you’re going to be able to monitor and control all of those services within that, correct?
Not on day one. This will be phased as we roll out. Certainly the vision is that every single HP device that goes out there for the employee experience—some of our stuff obviously is [for] gaming or for a different application, but everything that’s employee-centric, whether it’s a PC or printer or Poly device, if it’s touching that employee experience—we want it all to be administered in the same platform.
Will Workforce Central be a cloud-based service?
Workforce Central is cloud-based.
So Workforce Central will connect to Poly devices and services? Will Teradici remote computing services, now known under the HP Anyware brand, also plug into the toolbox?
Absolutely on Poly. My view is that whether it’s a PC or an audio device such as the one I’m using right now on our Zoom call, it’s all part of that employee experience, so that’s critical. Teradici has some amazing capabilities for certain types of employees. There are digital twinning capabilities when you’re transferring devices, so that’s important there and you’d want to tie it in there. If you are an animator and you want to be able to remotely access your graphics design machine, HP Anyware—which is our branding for Teradici—allows you to do that. And so of course you would want to make sure that it’s integrated seamlessly as well from a CIO point of view.
Are there plans to integrate Workforce Central with third-party software and services?
We’re already doing that to a certain extent. So ServiceNow, Microsoft integrations, absolutely. Certainly our largest enterprise customers already have applications in place from an employee servicing capability, so we want to provide that integration. Others, some smaller companies, they want to use this as a stand-alone platform, so we’ll offer that as well.
When you said that some of these integrations are now in place, such as with Microsoft and ServiceNow, does that cover services you’ll be able to access through Workforce Central?
We’re leveraging some of the existing integrations that we have with those two partners, and we’ll continue to centralize them and make the API access even more robust over time.
How many existing tools will Workforce Central replace?
Our vision is that is that it replaces all of these 64 individual services, so it becomes a single interface that you would use for all these 64 different interfaces. I’ve had very few customers say, ‘Hey, I want a separate, discrete interface for X, Y or Z,’ right? Everyone is saying, ‘Please pull it together. Make it simpler for me’ because, if anything right now, they have far too many different vendors and partnerships, and they just want one view. And so I think that’s really our approach here.
Now, that being said, we’re going to have one HP view of all the services, but we know that our partners may have services that sit on top that; Microsoft, ServiceNow services that sit on top of that. And so we want to make sure that we’re very integration-friendly, but from an HP point of view, we really want to provide one view of our ecosystem for employee management.
In your recent blog post about Workforce Central, you described it as a tool and a dashboard, but this also kind of sounds like a platform. You’re having all these services that sit on top of this platform. Are we thinking about this correctly? Or is that not the right way to think about it?
I’m a fan of calling it a toolbox. And here’s why: Especially when we’re talking to our channel partners, they’re going to go out and become the virtual CIOs to all of our mutual customers, and they’re going to have a set of tools that they want to use to service the needs of our customers. And so I’m calling this a toolbox for our channel partners, and it’s one that makes their job a lot easier and makes the employee experience a lot more seamless.
You talked about how Workforce Central will help partners become virtual CIOs for their customers. Can you elaborate on how will partners be able to incorporate Workforce Central into their business?
We see a bunch of different conversations with different types of partners. Some of them would love to just have a toolbox that they deploy on a white-label basis. Others have sophisticated service offerings of their own already, and they just want to plug into the data. And I think my message is one size does not fit all. We understand that, and so we fully expect to have a range of ways that our partners can engage and make money. We’re not trying to say there has to be one model for everyone because I don’t think that matches our partner base.
What are the different ways Workforce Central will help partners grow their business and become more profitable?
I think the most critical way is a strategic approach, which is to say we’re all about this employee experience, this digital employee experience, to bring the best of the HP know-how and knowledge across many, many global customers, whether that is the Poly approach to personas or how to best deploy PCs in 50 different countries and how that gets matched with persona employees worldwide.
So I think bringing that experience together, packaging that into a toolbox, is really mission No. 1. And whether they can make margin on additional upsell options, of course, that’s the plan. But my first strategic mission is to make sure that we’re taking the best know-how of HP across print, PC, collaboration and software, and saying, ‘Let’s deploy just an amazing digital employee experience for our customers.’
Will there be a compensation model for partners selling Workforce Central?
I am crystal clear on one thing. Our partners want to make money, and we want to make money. We’ll make money together. Crystal clear on that.
When will Workforce Central be available for partners?
I think the first version will be out this summer, and then we’ll roll out more versions over time.