HP unveils new Mission Critical Services with flexibility for changing economic climate

To help organizations keep their infrastructures up and running, HP Proactive Select offers customers an innovative way to access a variety of assessment, availability, performance, planning and training services.

With HP Proactive Select, customers purchase credits that can be used to choose from more than 85 technology services including those for blades, virtualization, networks, security, software and facilities.

HP Proactive Select lets customers quickly engage HP experts as needed for technology projects, reducing the risk of critical application downtime. Further, it provides a flexible resource for technology staffing to improve response time as business needs change.

HP also expanded its HP Critical Services and HP Proactive 24 Services with new response time options, proactive service choices and pricing for low-end servers.

These popular continuity and availability services improve efficiency for complex environments and help customers achieve success with projects such as consolidation using blades or virtualization. As operations become more efficient, technology staffs can deliver higher service levels to align with business goals.

"HP was the leader and unique in bringing the concept of Mission critical support to the Middle East market since more than 15 years ago. With the new offering, HP continue to show its leadership in this domain by extending the concept of high availability and mission critical support beyond the legacy systems to cover the whole technology infrastructure," said Samer Zein, HP technology Services Director for the Middle East.

Samer added, "This new offering is crucial and important for technology managers who need a lot of support to align with the changing requirements in the new tough economy."

A customer-centric approach to service delivery

HP Proactive Select provides increased service selection flexibility to help businesses reduce cost while delivering better, faster services. As an alternative to prepackaged services, it is ideal for maintaining an agile, resilient infrastructure.

The service includes an HP account support manager to assist with selecting services, overseeing projects and advising on next steps. This review of service implementation helps ensure successful execution and business value, as well as high levels of customer responsiveness.

"Businesses today operate under a new definition for what is mission critical. It goes far beyond the traditional notion of high availability for legacy servers," said Ron Silliman, principal analyst, Gartner. "To align with changing requirements in a tough economy, technology managers need flexible, expert services across the infrastructure."

HP Proactive Select streamlines customers' purchasing processes, letting them buy service credits stand-alone or with new hardware, with only one approval and procurement cycle for services delivered over one to five years. Customers may add credits or change services at any time.

Customers select from a broad spectrum of technology services, such as thermal assessments, VMware capacity planning, storage array availability assessments, critical network monitoring and software support. HP Proactive Select also includes access to skilled staff resources, training and best practices.

HP Mission Critical Services, including HP Proactive Select, HP Critical Services and HP Proactive 24 Services, deliver expertise gained from more than 30 years of ensuring customers' infrastructures are 'always on' - avoiding downtime while improving service processes. Further, they ensure service management best practices defined in the latest Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL v3), which HP helped develop.

HP Proactive Select and enhancements to HP Critical Services and HP Proactive 24 Services are available now worldwide through HP and its channel partners.