SINGAPORE--Hewlett-Packard has announced a new service initiative that it claims provides flexibility to customers during the current economic climate.

The company unveiled Proactive Select on Tuesday, a new component in its strategy to help midsize and large businesses keep their systems and technology running. Under this initiative, customers purchase pre-defined levels of credits and customize the services they require from a menu of 85 mission-critical services including those tied to security, software and virtualization.

Proactive Select customers will also have access to a dedicated account support manager to help assess business objectives and then translate them into IT objectives and deliverables. These HP agents hold HP mission-critical certification on top of ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) certification. Globally, HP employs more than 5,000 HP mission-critical experts and some 12,000 ITIL-certified professionals.

Proactive Select provides value to HP customers given the current economic climate, Romel Papali, director for enterprise server and storage mission-critical services in HP Asia-Pacific and Japan's Technology Solutions Group, said in a media briefing Monday. "In tough times like these, one of the things that typically happens is businesses will try to protect their margin. So what they do is, they knock off capital expenditure.

"But they do have a need to run their business on their existing infrastructure, and they need to change to [meet] the dynamic market [conditions]," he added. "So what they need are services.

Even though customers have to buy credits upfront for Proactive Select, the option is still more attractive than making capital investments, said Papali.

The menu of services, which covers not only technology but people and processes, is based on standardized methodologies and can be replicated worldwide with the same consistency, Papali noted. The broad offerings, he added, were necessary as research from Gartner, had indicated that 20 percent of unplanned downtime on average is due to hardware failure, but 80 percent is due to people and processes.

Customers can purchase 30, 60 or 180 credits with a validity of up to five years. A performance analysis measurement for Windows systems is equivalent to 10 credits, a data migration for open systems would take up 43 credits, and 120 credits would provide a comprehensive thermal assessment for data centers with a floor area of less than 10,000 sq feet.

According to Papali, customers can top up or roll-over credits and even change the services they require. Organizations that choose to purchase 30 credits can expect to pay about US$9,000 in the United States, but rates will be localized within the region, as labor rates for example, differ.

HP hopes the initiative will lead the company to the "next 10 percent of addressable market" in the region, Papali noted, but declined to provide a market size.