How digital technology is transforming industry and service offerings

SYNTEC NUMERIQUE: Jean-Paul Alibert, can the evolution of industry and service offerings illustrate the role of digital technology in economic transformation?

Jean-Paul ALIBERT: I’m convinced that the future of industry and services lies in a new convergence towards Solutions. Manufacturers are in the process of globalizing their range of products and related services into a Solutions offering, and in the same way, BtoC and BtoB service providers need to integrate more and more technologies into a Solutions offering.

Those who are not part of this new model will be condemned to become second-tier players, suppliers to those who have both mastery of the technologies and the ability to respond on the front line to a market need, and thus hold the relationship with the end customer.

SN: How do you see digital technologies facilitating this convergence?

JPA: There are many examples, and they cover all the different sectors of the company. It’s a global approach to market needs that will lead to the right choice of different technologies and services in the Solutions expected. And the implications are profound in multi-channel customer relations, the use of social networks, supply chain and solution design, co-engineering and crowd-design.

SN: This implies a different way of working…

JPA: This is the key to the success of this type of approach. You need to have teams capable of identifying customer needs and engineering them with the Labs. It’s much more than marketing, it’s putting sales, service teams, marketing and, of course, R&D and the Labs on the same virtual design team.

Next, you need to be able to move from transactional selling to selling Solutions based on customer needs. We need to move the customer towards a more global purchasing approach than the classic “slicing and dicing”, aligning suppliers on a single solution, all with a view to competing on price… This requires a great deal of convincing, and I’d even say evangelizing: salespeople must be able to talk to the customer’s various businesses, and build an adapted solution, based on industrial bricks of products and services. Not an easy task…

SN: In concrete terms, how did this transformation work out for HP in relation to its customers?

JPA: With our Solutions, we are responding to a need to transform their offer into Solutions. We offer our customers access to our products in a wide range of consumption modes, whether for the consumer or the enterprise. Two examples I know well: printers, plotters and computing infrastructures.

Traditionally, HP has sold plotters and inks, as well as related maintenance. Competition, particularly from compatible inks for non-warranty equipment, has prompted HP to work on a broader offer, and Solutions for the business. Of course, for many companies, this means MPS (Managed Print Services), in which the customer only buys a printing service, which he pays for by the printed page.

And beyond that, we have adapted our products to deliver Solutions tailored to specific needs. For example, in the construction industry, our plotters enable you to print out a plan on site, annotate it by hand, then scan it to share it instantly via a cloud managed by HP with other teams of architects, engineers, contractors, etc.

As far as computing infrastructures are concerned, we have naturally focused on consumption in Cloud mode, whether private or public, or even infrastructure owned and operated by our customers, but with the possibility of overflow to our public Clouds.

We have also launched a Datacenter offering, which can be operated by HP, and which combines all technological solutions and services in a “meta-computer” that can be replaced as a whole to change overnight from one technological generation to another.

This new approach enables us, for example, to offer a mobile telecom operator a real-time Quality of Service (QoS) measurement solution, to help it combat churn, but also to enable it to offer its customers quality of service. In addition to hardware, software and services, we deliver a whole range of dedicated telecom, big data and analytics products and services.

Finally, this “Solutions” approach gives us the opportunity to develop new service offerings that the traditional approach would not allow us to consider.

SN: So you see digital technology as a way of developing new business models?

JPA: Our digital companies claim to be the industry of the future, but also the future of industry. These transformations towards a new Solutions business model perfectly illustrate this leitmotiv.