Las Vegas – HP, heal thyself.
That’s the mission Hewlett Packard’s president, CEO and chairman Mark Hurd said he has challenged his own internal IT team with; righting its own bloated and inefficient IT infrastructure to not only improve HP’s own efficiency but show customers that, using HP technology, it can be done.
HP made a number of announcements at its Technology Forum conference here Monday centred around security, green storage and IT project delivery. In his keynote, Hurd said HP intends to be its own best showcase customer.
And he admits the vendor has serious challenges ahead of it. A technology giant that has done a number of acquisitions in recent years and has offerings across a wide swath of the technology marketplace, Hurd described HP’s own internal IT infrastructure as “disparate at best.” Like many companies, Hurd said HP was spending 80 per cent of its IT budget maintaining the existing infrastructure and was fighting a losing battle, adding IT costs were even increasing faster than company revenues.
Recognizing an unsustainable situation, Hurd charged his CIO with the mandate of lowering IT costs by “a whole bunch” while getting the right information to the right people at the right time and lowering compliance risk. But he added another wrinkle: it all had to be down with HP technology.
It’s not going to be easy, and it’s not going to be cheap, said Hurd. The company plans to ramp-up its capital spend by four times for three years to build the necessary IT infrastructure to support the adaptable environment envisioned.
“Don’t think that this is easy or free,” said Hurd. “But the fact we’ll invest capital is the key to getting it done.”
In addition to HP’s own ongoing internal IT makeover, Hurd also addressed the consumerization trend that he increasingly sees influencing all facets of enterprise IT. Pointing to HP’s straddling of both the consumer and enterprise markets as a competitive advantage, Hurd said HP intends to leverage everything in can from the consumer side and make use of industry-standard components to drive-down prices on enterprise products such as servers and blades.
“There is no company on Planet Earth or in the technology sector better equipped to leverage that trend,” said Hurd. “Trust us, we don’t want to protect the past. We want to innovate the future.”Lastly, addressing HP’s channel partner community, Hurd admitted HP has a lot of work to do with the channel and acknowledged that, in the past, the vendor has been too focused on developing technology and not enough on bringing that technology to market.
Pointing to the addition of 1,000 people to HP’s global enterprise sales team over the past year, Hurd said HP is investing to improve its coverage. The company has some 140,000 partners and Hurd said the goal is not to have 141,000, but to work more closely with the existing channel and help it help HP penetrate the mid-market.
“The biggest complaint I ever get is how difficult it is to do business with HP. I think people like our technology and our people, but we have to take our complexity and make it an advantage for you. We shouldn’t push our complexity on you,” said Hurd.
“We’re not there yet. We’ve got a lot of work to do at all levels.”
HP used the conference to unveil a host of new security-related offerings under a new moniker, HP Secure Advantage. Compliance and risk management are at the core of a number of the new offerings which include HP Compliance Warehouse, an appliance that will collect and analyze log data and automate reporting for compliance purposes. As well, 256-bit encryption was announced for HP’s StorageWorks LTO-4 Ultrium 1840 tape drives and anti-phishing toolbar was also released, featuring two-factor authentication and site validation, that VARs can integrate into their own offerings.
Green IT and power efficiency was also top of mind, and was the focus of a range of storage-related initiatives. HP boasts its green storage technology, which is part of its new StorageWorks EVA4100, 6100 and 8100 mid-range disk arrays as well as the several new tape drives, will cut storage array power and cooling costs in data centres by nearly 50 per cent.
The other area of focus for HP on Monday was software, with a series of announces related to its Quality Center and LoadRunner software and new quality management services. Quality Center will now see business requirements and quality management capabilities integrated in real time for “agile testing” of new software and updates, and a Quality Management ecosystem will provide partners the opportunity to develop and market test accelerators for Quality Center and LoadRunner software.
