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HP’s Work from Home service brings the office printer into your home

Chuong Nguyen
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With more employees working from home, Hewlett-Packard is reinventing its business and technology services to serve their needs while also seeking to keep IT managers happy.

The company announced a new set of curated services called HP Work From Home that are designed to minimize downtime, provide support for PCs and printers, and help IT managers secure devices if they’re lost.

HP launches new managed Work from Home service.
Image used with permission by copyright holder

HP claims this is the first time it is delivering print, PC, and services in just one offer with a single contract, which will help keep things easy for IT departments. 

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“The first offer here is HP Work From Home and it is a foundation for enabling more HP services in the future to support hybrid work,” the company said in a briefing ahead of today’s announcement. “And the benefit we seek to deliver is really an improved employee experience while simplifying life for IT. So, HP as a company is pivoting very strongly toward enabling better employee experiences and improved employee productivity while making sure that we deliver to IT the promise of simplification, better manageability, better security.”

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Essentially, when corporations purchase notebooks, desktops, workstations, and printers for employees, they can add in print services, PC services, and financing with the order for more robust support and management of the devices. Print services, like the company’s consumer subscription ink service for home users, will replenish printing supplies when they run low as employees print more and work more from home. HP promises next business day response and home delivery for the HP Print flexworker.

“We deliver to the home the devices, as well as supplies, and then we do automatic supplies replenishing,” an HP executive explained. “On the PC services side, we have a service called HP Proactive Insights, which provides rich telemetric data on the device performance and the application performance. What we’ve expanded Proactive Insights with is employee experience, which actually allows the IT teams or other line of business or HR teams to get a pass for how employees are doing through a survey functionality. And also part of the PC services, we have next business response on delivery, as well as HP factory services, which makes sure that the devices are delivered to the employee with the right image, and is customized for the user.”

HP provides unified support with new Work from Home offering.
Image used with permission by copyright holder

It’s a way for HP to bring its print services for corporate customers into the homes of employees as the location of work has changed. Rather than print at the office, HP is making it easy for businesses to provide OfficeJet Pro or LaserJet Pro printers to employees and provide supply management of these print solutions in a cost-effective way into the home. 

HP is also expanding its security suite to allow IT managers to better manage devices that are used remotely away from the office. The concern here is that devices could get stolen, and companies might suffer data theft, security breaches, and lost data. About 39% of work-from-home employees may access corporate and sensitive data using personal devices, which increases the risk for businesses. HP is helping to move work from home forward in a secure manner by adopting a zero trust policy.

“We’re monitoring within the device for any patterns out of the ordinary, any anomalous behavior that could be indicative of a compromise,” HP said. “And in the case where we do detect a potential compromise, we want to automatically return that device to the safe state prior to the attack, and that’s where we go through an automatic reboot of the device. And then lastl,y we want to apply those strong authentication mechanisms on the device.”

The company is essentially bringing corporate capabilities to work-from-home printers as one way to keep data secure, It also offers cloud management capabilities so IT managers can gain better insights on how work-from-home printers are set up from a security standpoint. On the PC side, HP is pushing its HP Wolf solution that allows remote devices to be locked, wiped, and restored if lost or stolen. 

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Chuong Nguyen
Chuong Nguyen
Computing Writer
Silicon Valley-based technology reporter and Giants baseball fan who splits his time between Northern California and Southern…
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