As the old saying goes, if you can’t beat ’em, enter a mutually beneficial partnership with them.
HP is partnering with fellow tech giant Oracle to offer a set of digital customer experience solutions to its enterprise clients. This means solutions for managing customer experiences across several channels such as the web, mobile and other devices. In addition to its own products, HP will recommend Oracle’s software, along with consultation and strategic advice on how to best deploy them, through its Enterprise Services division.
It’s an interesting move from HP, which frequently competes with Oracle, especially when it comes to solutions that help customers manage their digital engagement strategies. For example, HP’s Digital Marketing Hub has similiar web experience management tools as Oracle’s WebCenter. However, the partnership indicates that HP is taking on much more of an advisory service role, with Oracle providing a significant part of the product set.
“The play here for us is purely services,” says Robert Hildenbrand, vice president, worldwide Oracle Applications Services, HP Enterprise Services. “We recognize that Oracle has leading products in the market, while HP brings industry expertise and 40 years of system integration experience to help implement the best solutions for our customers.”
In other words, Oracle supplies the products, while HP tells you how to use them.
While Hildenbrand says he’s seen some demand for Oracle’s marketing automation tools, such as Eloqua, HP will mostly be recommending integrations with Oracle’s commerce and digital experience tools. That isn’t to say HP won’t be pushing its own products into the mix as well. Hildenbrand says the key value offered through the Enterprise Services unit is that it can pull in solutions from all across HP’s divisions. That could mean for example, customers wanting to provide HP laptops as part of their service, or utilize HP’s Helion to deploy their applications in the cloud. “We have so many solutions from across the organization, that we can offer customers the broadest set of tools for what they want to achieve,” says Hildenbrand. “Ultimately it comes down to what solution best serve the customer’s needs and fits into their existing architecture.”
