Buy service, take PCs free

BANGALORE: The day when `PC comes free and the service is charged’ seems to have arrived. HP India is rolling out its new `Desktop Lifecycle Services and Solution’ offering for enterprise users. The catch is that, any user opting for this service has to be an existing HP customer.

The move may help HP lock-in its customers - rather than convince companies using rival computer equipment to switch. The new service in simple terms means that, the users transfer the ownership of procurement and management of desktop assets to HP Services.

"Most of the times while acquiring a desktop, only the visible costs such as the initial purchase price, support contracts and training are accounted for. The hidden costs such as the under utilization, the administration, technology gap, the people downtime, standardization and control are overlooked," said NM Sundaram, Country Manager-Marketing and Strategy, HP Services. "While these are the major contributions for managing cost of a desktop. One of Gartner’s first recommendations to a CIO on how to cut cost is, to reduce diversity of desktop operating system and office suite," he adds.

DLSS or HP seat management solution takes care of this by replacing employee’s PCs and notebooks with new standardized PCs and notebooks, providing asset management and automatic obsolescence of old equipment, and by offering helpdesk and on-site support on a monthly per user rate.

"We have signed five corporate accounts in India, one of them being Adidas. We are on the roll out of this service, and we are taking this to our existing customers first, before signing in new clients," added Jesudas Andrade, Director of Customer Support at HP Services in India. "Enterprises can save up to 20 to 30 percent by deploying the DLSS over actual desktops."

HP promises customers signed for DLSS, procurement, deployment, helpdesk, virus support, break fix, software and hardware upgrades and asset management. "some financial benefits that a client would get for signing up with DLSS, is the reduction of TCO and initial capital outlay, predictable monthly expense and most importantly, tax benefits from higher expense write-off versus depreciation, which would excite the CFOs," commented, Ingrid Giraud, Business Development Manager, HP Customer Support Client Solutions-Asia Pacific.

The company expects the DLSS to leverage HP Services to supplement the product sales of HP in the market. It is quite bullish on the Indian market, where the domestic IT spend is on the rise and most of the enterprises are fed up with the maintenance of their desktops. Although driven by volumes, HP does not foresee the service to creep in to the home segment in the near future.