The HP Business Analytics Services utilizes the vendor’s business process outsourcing professionals to crunch customers’ structured and unstructured data of “unlimited” volumes, says Danila Meirlaen, HP outsourcing division vice president. Offered as a standalone service or as an add-on for existing clients, the services are technology agnostic and lean on offerings from HP’s Information Management and Analytics suite as well as from two big-name acquisitions made in the last two years, Vertica and Autonomy.
Meirlaen says that, based on scale and pricing, many services agreements would “probably start on the smaller side,” either with a new project for an existing client or a first-time analytics rollout for a customer new to HP and possibly larger analytics initiatives in general.
Palo Alto-based HP has had a rocky couple of years, including leadership changes at the top that have led to current CEO Meg Whitman, reported layoffs of thousands of workers during a restructuring, a roller coaster presence on Wall Street and a handful of multi-million dollar acquisitions. Whitman has emphasized that the year ahead, in terms of offerings, will be reliant on new and updated offerings in the cloud and for business analytics and storage.
In some ways, those changes are reflected in this new service, with heightened analytics capabilities based on Autonomy’s IDOL platform and expertise, Meirlaen says. However, she says that layoffs have not impacted the analytics outsourcing team that has been tapped to take on this new service venture. In addition, many Business Analytics Service members have “industry specific” specialties in areas like finance, risk management and marketing.
Mukesh Dialani, research manager for business process outsourcing services with IDC, says that the difference-maker for both HP and interested customers is the new attention to analytics as its own practice area. Like its competitors, HP has been providing some level of analytics outsourcing “for some time now,” but the renewed focus with Monday’s announcement opens the door to strengthened capabilities and enterprise attention.
“They have a reasonable talent pool – over 1,300 analytics professionals – and a sizeable BPO business. In my opinion this capability, in light of the recent business analytics related acquisitions of Autonomy and Vertica, shows that they are serious about this business,” Dialani says. “A stronger focus on business analytics backed by an industry specific approach will reap benefits to their overall outsourcing business and BPO business in particular.”
Justin Kern is senior editor at Information Management and can be reached at justin.kern@sourcemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @IMJustinKern.
