Many companies are turning to third-party support services because of the cost benefits and flexibility that they offer. Third-parties include vendors, agents, consultants, distributors, intermediaries, resellers and trading partners. HP is expanding its support services portfolio, which will now include third-party vendors.

With a new offering called HP Multivendor Services, the company is training its call center staff to field customer support calls for both HP and non-HP products, thereby enabling partners to maintain relationships with clients for issues that fall outside HP’s purview.

In an interview with CRN, Ken Archer, vice president of Channels and Alliances for HP Technology Services, said enabling partners to handle multivendor services opportunities is a necessity given the heterogeneous nature of data center infrastructure.

"Partners asked for this because in the data center, they are being asked by their customers to handle non-HP maintenance contracts from companies like Cisco (News - Alert), IBM and EMC," Archer told CRN. With HP's new offering, "Partners continue to be the 'trusted advisor' owning the total cost of maintenance."

Other additions include RAPID and a ServiceONE addition called Partner Financial Simulator. RAPID is a tool that helps partners selling HP Care pack Services to keep track of their contract renewals and the Partner Financial Simulator is a modeling tool for partners to gauge the top- and bottom-line impact of investing in services.

In today's economy, there is constant pressure to control IT costs. This is a critical driver for all IT organizations. More than 70 percent of most IT budgets is spent on managing the current environment instead of driving new innovations to enhance the business. Most IT organizations have a goal of rebalancing this equation. HP Integrated Multivendor Services aim to minimize downtime, control costs and improve ROI.

XS International is an IT services company that specializes in cross-platform OEM and alternative IT maintenance, data center consolidation, data center relocation, IT asset disposition and IT hardware and software sales. It helps federal agencies, contractors, universities and the commercial sector stretch their IT budgets without compromising quality or responsiveness. XSi provides third-party HP field maintenance and value added benefits and services, including contract flexibilities, payment flexibilities, hardware and software support beyond HP End-of-Life and End-of-Service.

In addition to maintenance for HP, XS International also offers support for Cisco, Juniper, Brocade, F5 Networks (News - Alert), Enterasys and IBM.