HPE Pointnext: Leading Digital Transformation for Our Customers
June 29, 2017 • Blog Post
Q&A with Ana Pinczuk
Recently, we launched HPE Pointnext, which combines our highly successful technology consulting and service groups to create one world-class services organization. We talked to Ana Pinczuk, senior vice president and general manager of HPE Pointnext to learn more about how the organization is helping customers with digital transformation.
Can you tell us a bit about what led you to HPE?
The main reason is that I am truly excited about the tremendous opportunity to transform HPE from mostly a hardware and product-based business to much more of a solution and service oriented business. The second reason is the people and culture of HPE - there is such an embedded richness in this company. It is a great opportunity to get to lead a transformation with great people on my team. The most exciting part for me is working with our customers as we transform from a services perspective, enabling our company to shift how we work with customers and partners.
Tell us a bit about HPE Pointnext.
HPE Pointnext is the services business that helps customers on their digital journey-including advisory and transformation capabilities, enabling the design and implementation, and migrating their IT environments and providing support. We provide a full portfolio of offerings from the beginning of a customers digital journey to the full lifecycle. The HPE Pointnext team consists of 25,000 committed people in 80 countries covering 30 languages, and we handle over 11,000 successful digital transformation engagements per year. Our team represented a third of the HPE revenue and half of HPE's profit in 2016.
What areas of the services organization do you see as the biggest opportunity?
Every industry is currently transforming, and we have the opportunity to help customers with that transformation, especially in terms of technology. Our customers are digitizing their environments right now by figuring out how to have a fully digitized presence, whether its a retail branch, financial services location or other type of business. Businesses want to give their customers a more proactive service capability, such as electric companies helping customers know their usage. Our goal is to help customers leverage a technology architecture to meet their business needs and business outcomes.
The second biggest opportunity is for us to create a consumption model where customers buy services based on needs and add more as they grow. Flexible consumption is a big opportunity and benefit for our customers.
The third opportunity is to help our customers-many that we have been serving for many years-move into new business areas. We are working to answer the question of how we expand our capabilities to customers so that they can expand their business. For many customers, it is a matter of looking at their own base of customers and figuring out how to move them to new capabilities and offer new services.
What are your top priorities for HPE Pointnext over the next 6 months?
One of my first priorities is continuing to build upon a rich set of capabilities and portfolios. I envision an edge solution that takes customers from the advancement phase to transformation. We want to clearly articulate to our customers how they can differentiate themselves though these capabilities. My second priority is to engage more fully with the channel, our partners, and our system integrator partners. We have a great set of go-to-market capabilities through our partner services. Now that we are a smaller and more focused company, we can really focus the channel on partner-ready services. Third, we want to continue to deliver great services, because we are only as a good as the capabilities that we deliver to our customers.
HPE decided to divest its enterprise services business and merge it with CSC to create DXC Technology. What will the relationship between HPE Pointnext and DXC Technology be moving forward?
DXC has been, and continues to be, a top customer for us. Right now, weve been working with DXC-and prior to that Enterprise Services-for many years. HPE Pointnext was part those offerings we enabled and jointly provided to our customers. We expect to continue that relationship and, in a sense, be HPE Pointnext inside the customer offerings we have with DXC. We want that to be a win-win relationship for our customers. Now with this separation, we also have another opportunity to set up the same arrangement with other system integrators. In addition to DXC, we continue to work closely with others, such Accenture, Deloitte and others. We are building really solid relationships.
Hybrid IT and the Intelligent Edge are core pillars to HPEs strategy. Can you tell us how HPE Pointnext supports this?
Two of our three pillars at HPE are to make Hybrid IT simple and to power the Intelligent Edge. I view HPE Pointnext as an enabler of these two pillars - to bring the services expertise to help customers on their journey. For example, when we think about Levi's Stadium in the Bay Area-you have a great experience ordering a hot dog and popcorn over wireless leveraging Aruba networking technologies-that is an edge experience. HPE Pointnext underwrites that experience. We are integral to the solutions that enables Hybrid IT and the Intelligent Edge outcome. We are going to partner very closely to deliver these outcomes to our customers.
HPEs ecosystem of partners now plays a more critical role than ever. Can you give us a sense on some recent work in this area?
Our ecosystem has many types of partners, such as technology partners and go-to-market partners. By working in agile transformations for our customers, we can bring in partners like Chef and Docker. We have an opportunity to bring industry leading partners to these solutions. We work with our partners to weave in reference models to use with our customers as they go through their digital transformation. As an example of a technology partner, we are working with Docker on the container as a service. We also have a set of solutions around Flexible Capacity for our go-to-market partners and recently worked with Wipro to enable them to offer this capability to their customers. Overall, we work with our partners to bundle the capabilities that they have with the capabilities that we have to make one plus one equal three.
There is now more of a focus at HPE around verticals and solution selling. How will HPE Pointnext play a role?
HPE is now focusing on vertical solutions, and HPE plays the role of providing a set of capabilities that really differentiates us from an IT infrastructure perspective. If you think about a Hybrid IT or Edge solution, we work at a horizontal level first, and then we have references to architecture solutions that we bring to market. We take those horizontal solutions and do a great job of understanding the specific nuances of the vertical.
For example, we provide a Hybrid IT solution that is generally a horizontal solution. However, we look at the Hybrid IT solution and see that its applicable for the transportation industry with its connected cars. After we find the vertical, we bring in other partners to work with us. Sometimes the partners in a vertical are new to us and different from our traditional partners. Our goal is to deliver a business outcome to the customer. We see ourselves as solution aggregators, so we can build the solution and deliver the whole solution to the customer.