HP looks for a bigger slice of Asian services pie

Priya Padmanabhan

BANGALORE: A change of guard took place at HP last month, when Som Mittal, the worldwide head for application services operations and managing director of HP GlobalSoft was named the senior vice president of HP services for Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ).

Mittal now moves from a services delivery management role to that of building business for HP’s services division in the Asia Pacific region.

Mittal’s mandate would be to increase the business footprint in the APJ region, which is one of the growth engines for the company’s $15.5 billion global services business. “APJ is the growth engine for HP globally and India is a growth engine for HP in APJ. We are looking at larger deals here,” said Mittal

India figures among the top five markets in the APJ for HP. Mittal said that the main growth verticals in India are banking, manufacturing, auto, pharma, and also traditional strongholds like communication, media and entertainment sectors.

HP’s services span consulting and integration, managed services and technology services. The company is also looking at new lines of services such as remote printing and imaging management services. This would manage printing solutions across an enterprise with a pay per use model.

The company is hoping to extend its success in printers to printing services as well. The estimated market for managed print services is at least $40 billion worldwide. Companies like 3M and Ford have already signed up as customers. Mittal hopes that this service would find takers in India as well.

HP’s service delivery centers are located in Bangalore and Chennai. The latter is also the company’s disaster recovery site. Recently, HP expanded its operations in Chennai by opening a second facility there that will accommodate 3000 people in two years’ time. The company is also evaluating other potential Indian cities for expansion.

On the factors that differentiate HP in the IT services business, Mittal said that customers prefer HP for its end to end services, since it offers a single point of response, ability to manage multi-vendor situations and open platforms.

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