It’s been almost a year since we launched HP Workforce Solutions, a new business division dedicated to helping business and IT professionals enhance their employees’ day-to-day digital experiences, so they are productive, collaborative and successful from everywhere.
Since our inception, we have been laser-focused on actively listening to our enterprise and SMB customers to understand their unique challenges. What is abundantly clear is that they are under immense pressure to accelerate digital transformation and create seamless employee experiences. And this has become increasingly difficult in a complex world of hybrid work and evolving cybersecurity threats.
HP is in a unique position to address these challenges. Today, HP is delighted to unveil new tools to manage and optimize employee productivity.
Managed Collaboration Services: State-of-the-Art Conference Rooms as a Service
As companies ask (or lure) employees back to offices, offering an attractive office environment that enables productivity and collaboration has become essential. Even in the office, meetings often require collaboration with colleagues around the globe, yet only 11% of conference rooms are video-enabled.1 This means employees are wasting valuable time searching for space to host virtual meetings. And once a room is secured, audio-visual problems are all too commonplace, disrupting meetings, impacting communication and ultimately harming employee productivity.
Today, we are excited to announce a new conference room as-a-service subscription for managing, operating and optimizing video conference rooms. We are currently piloting Managed Collaboration Services and plan to start rolling it out globally starting in April 2024.
Starting with an understanding of our customers’ unique employee personas and workplace policies, HP Managed Collaboration Services assesses an individual business’ needs and delivers cutting-edge Poly and HP technology to help customers create an outstanding conferencing experience.
Beyond the technology, the unique value of HP Managed Collaboration Services lies in its ability to extract and analyze data to deliver recommendations -- and even remediate some issues automatically before they occur. For example, customers will be able to gather insights about room occupancy, availability and usage rates so they can better understand how conference rooms are utilized and recommend adjustments to improve the experience and optimize usage.
In the coming year, we will also introduce features to enable our customers to proactively identify issues and initiate solutions. For example, if a conference room is still empty ten minutes after the start of a meeting, the room booking can be automatically cancelled to make it available to others. Customers will also have the ability to proactively identify if the equipment isn’t working in a room, rebook the scheduled meeting into a different room and notify the attendees ahead of the meeting start time.
And for employees that enter a conference room and encounter an issue, they’ll be able to simply press a help button on the control panel which connects them to a network operations service professional who can request remote control of the room and help fix the issue immediately. These are just a few examples of how our new offering will be developed to further enhance the conference room experience and employee productivity.
Workforce Central Launches Globally with AI-driven Insights and Actions
Our customers are also looking for a partner that can address the full lifecycle of employee productivity gear – from configuring devices to shipping them to an employee’s home and proactively fixing or upgrading as needed. Beyond that, they want insight into how all this gear is being used and for issues to be fixed before they even know about them.
In March 2023, we announced our plan to create Workforce Central, a single cloud-based dashboard that allows IT managers to discover, configure, monitor and manage HP services and solutions in one location. In just a few short months, we’ve made tremendous progress. We already have thousands of customers using Workforce Central in its beta mode.
This month, we will officially launch Workforce Central globally, giving access to all HP’s commercial customers and partners so they too can experience the benefits of the insights from a single, integrated management console. And starting in November, HP will enable ubiquitous telemetry across our entire portfolio of more than 200 million PCs, Poly systems and printers. This will give our customers and partners even more essential insights into the performance of their fleet.
But perhaps even more exciting is the introduction of powerful new Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology into our enhanced Proactive Insights tool. AI coupled with our telemetry will enable us to anticipate issues and deliver specific recommendations and solutions to support IT and improve the employee experience. Additionally, by correlating data such as software usage and IT help desk interactions, Proactive Insights can provide CIOs with insights on how to improve productivity and engagement. Proactive Insights will be accessible through Workforce Central in November 2023 (current customers will be automatically upgraded with these new capabilities).
HP Protect and Trace with HP Wolf Connect Available in November
Cybersecurity threats continue to be a top priority for companies of all sizes. While companies spend around $200 billion on cybersecurity each year,2 only a relatively small share of it is spent on endpoint security. Yet, one of the biggest vulnerabilities for the enterprise is the gear that employees are using at home, in the coffee shop, at customer sites and in the office. According to a recent Forrester study[3], accurate asset tracking was the top obstacle for surveyed organizations of all sizes as they address the challenges of remote endpoints. And the problem is only getting worse in today’s hybrid work environment.
In November, HP Protect and Trace with Wolf Connect, a cellular-based PC find, lock and erase solution, will be available globally. This HP-first will allow our customers to track devices and remotely wipe data, even if the PC is turned off, not connected to the Internet, or won’t boot.
Here are a few ways companies can use this solution:
- Instantly lock a PC that’s been misplaced by a travelling employee
- Remotely erase a PC that’s been stolen to protect sensitive data
- Track fleet assets to drive financial efficiency and sustainability
- Render a PC useless to prevent it from being illegally sold
HP Wolf Protect and Trace helps mitigate risks, reduces the total impact and offers peace of mind knowing data and devices are in safe hands with an industry leader in devices, services, and security. HP is the only PC OEM offering this service today.
With all these new services and solution enhancements, we are empowering CIOs to deliver the best digital experience no matter where their employees are working in the world.
For more information on HP Imagine, visit our newsroom.