Distributed, remote, mobile – these are the realities of today’s workforce. The workspace isn’t defined by windows and walls and common area couches. For millions of SMB employees, the workspace isn’t a physical location – it’s a virtual space defined by access from multiple screens which are used from multiple locations. Consider these data points from Techaisle’s SMB survey research. Pre-pandemic, 24% of SMB global workforce was mobile. Today, the number has jumped to 51% within small businesses and 47% in midmarket firms. These numbers are down from a high of 78% during country lockdowns. The category, “mobile workers”, is increasingly indistinguishable from “workers.” This means new ways of working, taking advantage of new technologies and capabilities to build an agile, mobile, secure work-style enabled by cloud, remote work, security and collaboration. When working remotely, 47% of SMB mobile workforce are using notebook to access corporate data, 9% tablets and 44% smartphones. If the office of an SMB is defined by devices, workplace is defined by the ability to work from wherever those devices and their users are located. As a result, 64% of SMBs are increasing investments in remote work solutions, and survey data shows there will likely be a whopping 380% increase in digital workplace adoption in the next one year within small businesses and 48% increase within midmarket firms.

The key focus is about the ‘future of work’: workflow, workspaces, workforce and the ways that an increasingly-connected world can support pursuit of previously-unattainable objectives for the SMBs and midmarket firms. Their most important technology-related effort is on connectedness – connected cloud, edge, applications, security, collaboration, workspaces and insights. Cloud and mobility are navigation routes but the always-on, everywhere-connected unified platform is the destination. These SMBs are looking for benefits arising from the interconnection of all types of resources: platforms/environments, information, devices and applications. Depth discussions and quantitative survey research with SMBs and midmarket firms points to a trend that is playing out across seven key areas as shown in the chart below:

Pandemic has changed how businesses operate, employees work, customers purchase and goods/services get delivered. This has also changed how small and midmarket firms are evaluating their core, cloud and edge technology needs to address their accelerated digital transformation objectives of cost efficiencies, operational excellence, innovation, business growth, organizational empowerment and customer intimacy. Clearly, core infrastructure has evolved to meet future digital transformation demands, but the question is how are small businesses and midmarket firms planning to adopt forward-facing solutions, like Artificial Intelligence, 5G, AR/VR, IoT, analytics and several others. There is a general sense within the SMBs that these advanced solutions will increase insight into and control over key aspects of their business operations and deliver benefits in different ways and to different ends.

Remaining true to the core belief of tracking the future of SMBs and channel partners, Techaisle studied global SMBs to determine future, planned and likely adoption patterns of several technology areas. The study of SMB and Midmarket digital transformation trends identified top 15 technology categories where the adoption growth rates will likely be highest in the next six months to a year. There are some surprises, for example, chatbots (for customer responsiveness), 5G (for enhanced mobility), open source (for cloud management, modernization and lower TCO), AI (for customer experience, security, operations) and several expected, for example, SD-WAN, HCI, WVD/VDI/DaaS and UCaaS.

To meet the managed services needs of the SMB segment, Lenovo has introduced two unique offerings within the Lenovo Managed Services umbrella –

1. CSP Managed Services - to help manage SMBs’ existing Microsoft-based cloud software and products.

2. Endpoint Managed Services – to provide deeper levels of endpoint and security management along with Premier Support, or Premium Care, Accidental Damage Protection. It includes CSP Managed Services.

The two offerings cover three important components of an SMB’s managed services lifecycle.

1. A bundled set of offerings providing full ground cover for employee productivity with M365, end-point management through MS Intune, backup using OneDrive, protection against phishing/malware with O365 Advanced Threat Protection and collaboration using Microsoft Teams.

2. Right-sized and customizable onboarding solutions with white glove service for configuration using Windows Autopilot including imaging and asset tagging, deployment and file migration.

3. Full suite of support and maintenance built on Lenovo’s Premier Support solution with end-to-end case management by a dedicated customer success manager thereby removing a significant burden from SMB IT teams freeing them to deliver business results.

Also included in the services are 24x7 Level 1 support via phone, email, and chat – Premier Support or Premium Care for both existing and new Lenovo devices and Enhanced Level 2 support to resolve email access, user authentication, calling or chat, and OneDrive / SharePoint data access issues.

Techaisle Take

IT support dialogue is dominated by discussions about time – cost of downtime, importance of uptime, response time and mean time to resolve a technical problem. The SMB user community, from executives to clerical staff, divide time in two: “our time,” which is when technology is used to support their business activities and increase market momentum, and “lost time” – the time that IT spends setting up accounts, configuring devices, changing permissions, upgrading systems, adding different security protections, finding lost data and fixing problems that can range from a forgotten password to a flattened PC. Lost time is seen as an obstacle to productivity, sales and business success. Despite increasing reliance on technology, SMBs are unable to staff for peak support requirements. IT staff needs to ensure that scarce internal resources are able to deliver technology efficiently, supporting innovation and transformation while responding immediately and effectively to lost time requirements and crises.

A recent study by global SMB and midmarket IT research firm Techaisle found that maintenance and support consumes 77% of SMB IT staff time, leaving only 23% of time for transformation initiatives. Nearly half of maintenance and support cycles are dedicated to PCs, making it difficult for staff to respond to issues relating to smartphones and tablets, servers and networks, and software and security systems.

SMBs find themselves in a tight spot when it comes to their IT functions. Their businesses are complex enough to warrant dedicated IT groups, yet lack the resources to manage everything asked of them. Teams are stretched to cover PC fleets, servers, networks, software and security – all while being expected to contribute to business growth, reduce costs and improve employee productivity. More than a decade of Techaisle SMB survey research data shows that only 3% of small businesses have full-time internal IT staff. Even within midmarket firms, average number of support staff is 22 which is 1/20^th of an enterprise business.

Regardless of having scarce internal IT staff, SMBs are increasingly dependent on information technology. A Techaisle survey found that 78% of small businesses and 97% of midmarket firms consider technology to be important to their business success, and 37% report that they have become more dependent on technology in the recent past. These SMBs are dealing with an ever-expanding portfolio of increasingly-complex applications and platform technologies. At the same time, these firms are struggling to rein in IT-related expenditures, including staff-related costs. This combination of increased reliance on technology as a key element of business success, burgeoning complexity and cost constraint has created a ‘perfect storm’ for use of managed services.

This is where Lenovo is stepping in.

Lenovo has a come a long way from being a PC manufacturer to an IT vendor to a trusted advisor for the SMB segment. Lenovo’s offering is built on a simple promise: to deliver managed services by making the most of highly adopted Microsoft tools by deploying real solutions for everyday challenges and technology needs. Supporting this promise are three core pillars of Lenovo Managed Services offering:

Improving employee and IT staff productivity. Techaisle’s recent data shows that each year, SMBs experience 545 hours of lost staff productivity due to IT outages with employees spending nearly 30 minutes a week troubleshooting PC issues. An average of 225 hours of productive time is lost due to PC outages reducing IT efficiency.

Digging deeper into Techaisle’s SMB data on time spent on PC lifecycle management, research finds that 57% of time is allocated to deployment and repairs, with an additional 15% allocated to software-related management issues and 9% to OS migrations. Taken together, these statistics indicate that there is very little opportunity for IT to contribute to their time priorities.

Providing IT security. For 53% of SMBs cybersecurity is a pressing concern; 64% of SMBs experienced a security breach in the last one year and 37% suffered a cyberattack. Through its managed services offering, not only does Lenovo plan to provide a ramped-up level of service and support for various devices but also include automatic enrollment of devices into endpoint management, threat protection, information protection, remote wipe and restoration of devices, as well as OS and application patch management. In addition, Lenovo can help manage licenses, add and remove users, and assign user accounts to available licenses.

Enabling connected collaboration. Collaboration is a priority for 75% of SMBs, 58% of SMBs expect MS Office setup, 56% need data/file migration support, 55% want email and Teams configuration. SMB customers will receive Microsoft Cloud Migration support, where Lenovo teams can help configure online exchange and migrate customer mailbox, Teams application for chat and calling features. Lenovo’s services can also help in migrating files and folders to OneDrive or SharePoint.

Lenovo’s thoughtfully designed SMB-focused managed services solutions aim to deliver real value by helping SMBs increase their productivity by supporting time consuming tasks like Microsoft tenant onboarding, Microsoft Cloud migration, and supporting Microsoft software-based issue resolution, provide security against business-critical threats through real-time threat protection, resolution, and information and data loss prevention, saving SMBs from valuable downtime, and providing peace of mind.

Customer Success Manager & Endpoint Dashboard

Techaisle managed services research data shows that 74% of SMBs expect a single point of contact from their managed services provider. To that extent, one of the most important aspect of Lenovo’s Endpoint Managed Service is the feature that SMBs will be assigned a Customer Success Manager, who works as the customer’s advocate within Lenovo, working to create a truly great customer experience. The Customer Success Manager owns a monthly business review with the customer, discuss device fleet health checks, suggest productivity and security improvements to enhance the SMB’s business operation, and work with technical experts to manage issues escalation.

Lenovo has partnered with Microsoft to develop Endpoint 360° dashboard which provides near real-time visibility of SMB’s device fleet and IT ticket status.

Channel Partner participation

Channel partners are essential in managing an SMB customer’s IT infrastructure. Lenovo’s CSP Managed Services and Endpoint Managed Services are available to Lenovo partners selling Microsoft SaaS products via Lenovo. Partners have a choice:

• Delivery of services by Lenovo: Channel partner sells and Lenovo provides all levels of service

• Partner and Lenovo co-delivery of services: Lenovo provides day-to-day endpoint productivity and security management but channel partner acts as the customer success manager and owns monthly business reviews, issue escalations on behalf of the SMB customer. Partner gets access to Lenovo’s Endpoint 360° dashboard Customer Success Manager role, and

• Partner can deliver all levels of service: Channel partner will get access to additional roles in Lenovo’s Endpoint 360° dashboard providing the partner with information that helps take proactive actions to prevent productivity and security impacts to SMB customer’s device fleet. Lenovo will provide Level 3 technical engineering support for Endpoint 360° dashboard, billing & ITSM platform issue support, and Microsoft platform issue escalation and resolution.

• Lenovo Cloud Marketplace: Lenovo has partnered with AppXite to deploy an ITSM platform which will allow partners to sell Microsoft 365 offers and Lenovo Managed Service packages, customize look and feel of the platform to meet their own design choices, create their own product bundles that include their own offers with Lenovo offers, manage customer subscriptions and recurring billing, get visibility to customer issues and their real-time status.

As per Techaisle channel partner survey research, 47% prefer delivering all levels of services and 40% believe in co-delivery or support and services provided by the vendor. A majority of smaller channel partners want vendor to provide all levels of service. Smaller MSPs profitability lies in their ability to scale and if are only focused on growth, MSPs lose their ability to develop a consultative practice enabling digital transformation within their SMB customers. Lenovo is bringing pre-configured, pre-packaged solutions that MSPs can offer, and directly provide the service. MSPs can also sell the offers and let Lenovo provide services on a platform with a single pane of glass dashboard, along with a customer success manager. This becomes extremely useful, which will allow the MSP to focus attention on delivering new business outcomes for their SMB customers.

Final Techaisle Take

Lenovo Managed Services checks all boxes for a vast majority of SMBs. Techaisle’s research highlights a list of priority outcomes that SMBs use to plot the best path in deploying managed services within their organizations.

• Minimize downtime and workforce productivity interruptions
• Reduce time spent on case management
• Focus on highest-value initiatives

These illustrate the ways that SMBs can use Lenovo Managed Services to drive better productivity within the IT department and across the entire organization. Remedial support, system failures and security incidents are major sources of ‘lost time’ incidents that can impede SMB business success. However, SMBs can reduce time lost to outages, and focus on ‘our time’ objectives – increased productivity and better collaboration on transformative projects – that deliver accelerated business success.

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In response to my question, “what defines HPE’s SMB go-to-market strategy?”, Tim Peters, Vice President and General Manager, SMB, put it eloquently, “local empowered presence as a business solution provider through the largest partner network”. Perhaps, therein lies the paradoxical problem. HPE GreenLake and Ezmeral are top discussion topics amongst partners, enterprise customers, media and analysts. But none of these are yet available and targeted towards the SMB customer. Regardless of having a wide portfolio of SMB solutions, HPE’s SMB go-to-market messaging strategy is getting drowned under the onslaught of “return to software” shift. As a result, channel partners have become the most important conduit for information source and SMB solution selling. But data also shows that 70% of an SMB buyer’s journey is complete before first contact with a supplier (channel partner or direct vendor).

Partners resolving the paradoxical problem

The paradoxical problem that HPE faces relates to marketing to two bookends of market segments – enterprise with a software solution approach targeting developers and IT buyers and the SMB customer with a yet to neatly defined as-a-service offering where the primary buyer is the business management. As HPE continues to design GreenLake enabled offerings for the SMBs, utmost reliance on partners is important. Partners contribute to creating, shaping and defining demand – in some cases by making customers aware of a new category or product, in others by helping to define solution requirements or specifications. To achieve partner success within the SMB market, HPE is focused on reducing friction across its enablement initiatives. Launched three years ago, HPE has brought to the forefront its enablement program Pro Series – Sales Pro, Tech Pro, Marketing Pro. Partners can tailor their experiences based on SMB market segment, a robust program for channel partners for a unified learning experience and digital marketing. (More on this in a future Techaisle Take analysis). So the question is, is HPE relevant for SMB customers?

Is HPE relevant for SMB customers?

Yes, despite an intense focus on the enterprise segment, HPE is one of a handful of vendor suppliers with a dedicated SMB executive team, and a partner organization, under Paul Hunter, that is stepping up its commitment to SMB channel partners.

Enabling Digital transformation

79% of SMBs are on the road to digital transformation. The roadmap to successful digital transformation begins with the creation of a sound physical infrastructure - the ‘building blocks’ or ‘foundations’ of business infrastructure. The most advanced and digitally transformed SMB firms are looking to improve their ability to effectively manage IT delivery into the future – cost efficiencies, operational excellence, innovation, business growth, organizational productivity and IT’s speed and agility. HPE solutions lay the foundation for effective, agile, secure modernization and transformation.

I like that HPE does not have a catch-all process for selling digital transformation solutions to the SMB customers. There is a deliberate process to empower partners to understand an SMB customer's workloads and digital transformation stages before recommending, architecting, deploying and managing digital transformation solutions to deliver business outcomes.

Adopting Hybrid IT

Techaisle research shows that SMBs use a mix of public, private and public clouds – and that businesses often use two or three of these approaches simultaneously but they are definitely settling on the “best approach” which is hybrid. Workloads on hybrid has gone up by 30% in the last one year and basic hybrid deployment is expected to increase by 56% in the next one year. Hosted infrastructure will likely see a growth of 131% in the next one year.

HPE has several offerings for hybrid environments, including HPE OneSphere, HPE ProLiant for Azure Stack and Cloud-Ready Storage. Specifically, for SMBs, HPE has a set of five hybrid cloud solutions. Built upon the core features of HPE ProLiant Gen10 servers and Microsoft Azure services, these hybrid cloud offers provide a path to SMBs to enhance productivity, improve IT service delivery and manage cost efficiencies. The offering includes – Hybrid Remote Workers, Hybrid File and Backup, Hybrid Virtualization, Hybrid Development and Test, Hybrid Database.

In addition, HPE has solutions tailored for small businesses. Leading with its HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus featuring remote management and security capabilities. The solutions include Office in a Box, Scalable File and Backup as well as Edge to Cloud for simplified access to cloud services.

Deploying Hyperconverged Infrastructure

Techaisle data shows that HCI adoption is within the top ten IT priorities for SMB customers. Although a distant third in HCI deployment, HPE’s SimpliVity solution has been growing at the edge for SMBs. It requires only 2 nodes to start, does not require separate storage and backup, and restoration can be done from a point in time. HPE’s dHCI is ideal for SMBs who want their compute or storage or network to scale independently. The entire environment is managed through vCenter and monitored through InfoSight making it easy for SMBs. It separates compute and storage so that they can grow independently giving the SMB customer flexibility of HCI.

Implementing Networking

Aruba Instant On announced last year, is suited for 100 users and below, extends to 7 switches and has both wired and wireless unified management through Aruba Central. However, it is only offered as a subscription service. John Moran, Sales Director, North America, HPE Aruba, points out that HPE has not come across Cisco’s Meraki Go in a competitive environment. I believe it is because Aruba Instant On is truly meant for the midmarket customers whereas Meraki Go is for the small businesses. Many SMBs still prefer outright purchase rather than subscriptions.

Is there a missing middle – midmarket segment?

Ignite Midmarket initiative, announced at HPE Discover in 2019, seems to have retreated into the background. As per Antonio Neri, President and CEO, HPE, midmarket initiative is still active and very important to HPE’s success. Within the HPE GreenLake Cloud services, HPE has designed 17 pre-configured offerings, available in small, medium, large pre-configured services which can be installed within 14 days. Some of the services are suitable for the midmarket segment.

HPE GreenLake Hybrid Cloud is of huge interest to the midmarket segment because it offers the promise of consumption-based cloud solution for on-premise scalability, security, performance and cost management without over-investment in infrastructure allowing cloud management of both public and private resources from one console. HPE is extending its GreenLake offerings for the midmarket for quick deployments of workloads with right sized and ready to go storage, compute and virtualization. For midmarket firms which do not own and manage their own data centers, HPE has partnered with Equinix and CyrusOne to offer co-location solutions. To help its channel partners that serve the midmarket segment, HPE has developed a new quoting tool that reduces quote time from 18 hours to 15 minutes.

HPE’s everything-as-a-Service enablers

HPE GreenLake

It is no secret that HPE has strategically dived into its swim-lane with a commitment to offer “everything-as-a-service” by 2022 - entire portfolio through a range of subscription, pay-per-use and consumption driven offerings. HPE GreenLake, which offers a flexible alternative to traditional on-premise IT hardware consumption, is the foundation for HPE’s as-a-service strategy. HPE’s GreenLake platform hosts servers, storage and networking in-house while retaining connectivity to multiple clouds overlaying with its own software and services. Cray acquisition in May 2019 is enabling HPE to offer HPC as-a-service for some of the most demanding workloads. HPE says that GreenLake has 90%+ customer retention rate (99% in July 2019).

HPE’s vision is to become the Edge-to-Cloud Platform as-a-Service company with a focus on customer use cases and solutions and HPE Ezmeral is core to its strategy. HPE already competes against Dell in storage, servers, and networking, with Cisco in networking, and with Lenovo in servers and NetApp in storage. With the launch of Ezmeral, HPE has expanded its competitive footprint to include VMware Tanzu and Red Hat OpenShift, but HPE is quick to point out that Ezmeral is the only solution with built-in persistent storage. VMware and Red Hat are also partnering and HPE is working with both to define where Ezmeral can really add value. As customer traction is increasing, the competition is also stepping up, specifically, Dell Technologies On Demand, Azure Stack, AWS Outposts, Lenovo TruScale Infrastructure Services.

Once HPE launches GreenLake for SMB segment and provides access to GreenLake Central to MSPs and channel partners we could very well see a welcome arrival of HPE's everything-as-a-service strategy into the SMB segment.

Hybrid Cloud focus

Public cloud, private cloud and hybrid cloud approaches each offer unique business benefits to the adopting organization. While public cloud can deliver rapid scale for temporary workloads or support smaller businesses that find appeal in OPEX procurement models, private cloud can deliver scale at better cost in some circumstances, while hybrid cloud offers better, faster access to formerly siloed sources of information. In each case, cloud capabilities, including automation, programmability, self-service access to on-demand resources and consumption metering, can help transform IT from a cost center to business enabler.

HPE has an alliance with Google to adopt Kubernetes in hybrid cloud environments and extend reach of its software-defined infrastructure for building private clouds to legacy ProLiant servers, HPE Nimble Storage dHCI and HPE Cloud Volumes Block. HPE is giving its customers an option of deploying on-prem servers with virtual machines with either a VMware vSAN storage software or the HPE SimpliVity hyperconverged infrastructure platform. Additionally, customers have the option of deploying Kubernetes on bare-metal server. HPE is also embedding its HPE OneView IT infrastructure management and HPE Composable Fabric networking solution to create a composable rack environment. HPE’s partnership with Nutanix provides an integrated hybrid cloud as a Service (aaS) option by leveraging Nutanix’s Enterprise Cloud OS software, AHV hypervisor and delivering the solution through HPE GreenLake for a fully HPE-managed hybrid cloud.

The scene stealer - Ezmeral

No doubt Ezmeral was a scene stealer at HPE Discover Virtual Event. It is a complete software portfolio spanning container management, AI/ML and data analytics, cost control, IT automation and AI-driven operations and security. It is expected to speed innovation, transform applications and data from edge to the cloud. All of these are within the planned technology adoption path and essential to enabling digital transformation for 83% of midmarket firms to reduce IT deficit and deliver previously unimaginable business outcomes. HPE’s initial focus is the enterprise segment. I strongly urge to not leave the midmarket segment behind. It is the true battleground segment.

Related HPE Techaisle Takes

HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen 10 Plus focuses on SMB Digital Transformation
HPE boldly pivoting headlong into post-transactional market
HPE addressing SMB and channel partner Hybrid IT demands
HPE vs Dell SMB IT solution stack
HPE – doubling down to be SMB’s IT partner of choice
Dell, HPE, IBM, Cisco competing for global SMB US$1 trillion IT Spend
Hyperconverged Infrastructure on a high-growth trajectory within SMBs and midmarket firms