Thursday, June 17, 2010

HP's Bill Veghte on Managing Complexity Amid Converging IT 'Inflection Points'

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast with HP's Executive Vice President Bill Veghte on managing change in IT as virtualization, cloud and mobility gain importance.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series, coming to you from the HP Software Universe 2010 Conference in Washington D.C. We're here the week of June 14, 2010, to explore some major enterprise software and solutions trends and innovations making news across HP’s ecosystem of customers, partners, and developers.

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions and I'll be your host throughout this series of HP sponsored Software Universe Live discussions.

Please join me now in welcoming Bill Veghte, Executive Vice President of the HP Software & Solutions group. Welcome to BriefingsDirect, Bill.

Bill Veghte: Great. Thanks, Dana.

Gardner: We've heard a lot here about how tough things are. We're used to hearing tough economy stories, but now we're hearing about tough management and complexity stories.

We're also hearing about inflection points. Could describe for me what you see right now in the IT business, as an inflection point or points, and how that relates or compares to some of the past game-changing times in the history of IT?

Veghte: Dana, I spend a lot of time out there with CIOs and IT professionals, and we're at two remarkable inflection points in our industry.

The first is in terms of how businesses are delivering IT, and that's on three dimensions. The first is virtualization. There's a lot of not only conversation, but moving workloads of application services to a virtualized environment. Look at the numbers. People say that over 25 percent of x86 server workloads are now virtualized, and that number looks like it's going to accelerate over the next couple of years.

Correspondingly, there's a heck of a lot of conversation around cloud. People wrap a lot up in that word, but many of the customers tell me they think of it as just another way of delivering experiences to their end-customers. And, in cloud there's platform, applications, and private versus public, but it's another choice point for CIOs and IT folks.

The final piece in terms of IT delivery is that there are a heck of a lot of mobile devices, over a billion mobile devices, accessing the Internet. With the advent of smartphones, a very rich viewing and consuming medium, people expect to have that information.

Those things are incredible tools and opportunities, whether you characterize it in a balance sheet, and moving from capital expenditure to operating expense, or whether you characterize it in anytime/anywhere information on your mobile device. But with that, it does bring more choice points and more complexity.

Breadth and depth

The other inflection point that I'd highlight, Dana, is the breadth and depth of data that’s being generated. You and I both know that digital information is doubling globally every 12 to 18 months. In the midst of all the digital photos or whatever, sometimes people lose track of the fact that 85 percent of that data resides in businesses. And the fastest growing part of that is in unstructured data.

Now, the most precious resource is your ability to take that data and translate it into actionable information. The companies and businesses that are able to do that have a real competitive advantage.

You can put that in the context of a specific business operation. If you're a pharmaceutical, how quickly can you bring a drug to market? You can characterize that in a financial services organization. Do you have better, quicker data and market movements?

You can characterize it in an IT . There's an enormous amount of IT information and data, but how do I parse it out to the things that are going to represent a service desk ticket, and can I automate that so I am not putting people in the middle?

When I think about it in a historic context, I'd highlight a couple of things. One is that we're going through the biggest change in IT delivery since client-server, because of the three delivery vehicle changes that I highlighted. That, in turn, is going to generate a very significant refresh in applications and services.

Given the complexity that I just characterized, there's a real opportunity to bring more of a portfolio approach to delivering those solutions to customers.



You don't have the time deadline in the same way that we did with Y2K, but the CIOs and IT and apps folks that I know, as the economy is recovering, are looking at their application and service portfolios and saying, "How am I going to refresh this to take advantage of these new and different delivery vehicles?"

Gardner: How does that relate to HP? You're relatively new to HP. You had a long and distinguished career at Microsoft, and you've been here for a little over a month or so. How do these inflection points and the opportunity that you perceive for HP come together? Perhaps you could fill in on what attracted you to HP.

Veghte: Sure, Dana. As I looked across the marketplace and at this inflection point, there are a couple of things that attracted me to HP. One, I think HP is uniquely positioned in the marketplace, because it has a great portfolio as a company, across not only services, but also hardware and software.

On the software side, there is a remarkable portfolio of assets within HP, across application development and quality to the operations side. Yet, given the complexity that I just characterized, there's a real opportunity to bring more of a portfolio approach to delivering those solutions to customers.

Doing remarkable things

The final piece that I would highlight is that I worked for many years with HP as a partner. Whether it be Todd Bradley, who I worked with around the Windows business, or Mark [Hurd], as the executive sponsor for the HP Partnership, when I was on the Microsoft side, they're a great group of people doing some remarkable things.

If you look at what that executive leadership team has done over the last couple of years with and for HP customers, it’s exciting to think what we can do over the next five or six years.

Gardner: Speaking of HP customers, they sure are here at Software Universe. There are thousands of what we can call hardcore HP folks. What are they telling you? What have you learned? What has surprised you in your interactions in the last few days?

Veghte: It's been a great Software Universe for us. Compared with years past, there is a degree of energy and optimism in customers that's very invigorating. I've been in back-to-back meetings. You walk in, and they are excited about the innovations that we're bringing into market.

We've had a variety of very exciting announcements, such as Business Service Management 9.0. Some of the announcements were around the ability to automate how you take a production environment and apply it into a text script.

I think that they're constructively challenging us to make sure that we have a set of tools that are effectively scaling into the most complex operating environments in IT in the world.



The areas that customers are highlighting are: "You've got a great portfolio. You're heading in the right direction. Keep that pedal down. Take advantage of the fact that you've got not only fantastic best-of-breed capabilities in individual areas, but that you've got this breadth of offerings. I'm going to evaluate you against my entire solution set."

It starts with the strategy. In fact, there was a great customer meeting this morning. The customer said, "Look, I use you in a bunch of different ways, and I think you've got a great product. Now, what I need you to do is step up and make sure that from strategy, to application, to operation you're delivering that cohesion for me. I see good steps, but I want to see you keep doing it."

I think that they're constructively challenging us to make sure that we have a set of tools that are effectively scaling into the most complex operating environments in IT in the world, and making sure that, as the additional complexity in delivery vehicles that I just highlighted come online, that we continue to make sure that we are scaling effectively to deliver for the customers.

For example, at Software Universe 2010, in the Business Service Management case we announced, not only will we be providing a near real-time dynamic view of IT, but we are doing it across virtualized and cloud implementations. I just came from the session, where we were demoing to 3,500 people the ability to display that information on a smartphone across a variety of platforms -- from BlackBerry to iPhone to a Sprint device.

Gardner: It seems like complexity is the common foe here. ... When we talk about virtualized workloads. And when we have a variety of sourcing options -- on-premises, off-premises cloud, private, colo, hosting -- and also complexity, as you point out, in the number of endpoints or different devices.

Perhaps customers are wondering how to stay up with this accelerating pace of complexity. How could we think about the role of IT? What does IT need to be thinking in terms of itself? How should it perceive of itself in the next few years, vis-à-vis this common sense of budding complexity?

Continuing to evolve

Veghte: Well, Dana, the thing I'd go back to is those two inflection points that I highlighted, because I think they're very important, when we think about the fact that the role of IT continues to evolve.

First, as an IT organization, I have more choices in terms of how I am delivering my application service for and with business. I increasingly become a service broker, because I'm looking across my applications and services and deciding with the business what’s the most cost effective and best way of delivering those experiences for the businesses.

Second is, and we've talked about this as an industry for a long time, the continuing blending of business and IT. A customer from a Fortune 5 company was in a meeting with me earlier this week. He's been in the industry for 25 years, a very sharp guy, and in a deep partnership with HP.

He said that this year there are more people from business operations coming to Software Universe than there are from IT operations. He said, the reality is that whether you talk about it in the context of PPM or application and service requirements, those two functions are intermingling. Given the software footprint and portfolio we have, it’s a wonderful opportunity, but that continues to accelerate.

The final piece that I would highlight is not a change, but a continuity. Even as IT has a broader set of choices, and the relationship with the businesses continue to intertwine more and more, they're not off the hook, when it comes to security or compliance or the availability and performance of the solutions that they are responsible for supporting and delivering for the business. So, it’s important to factor that even as we look ahead.

This has been illustrated time and time again. The most successful businesses have figured out how to constructively apply IT to run a business.



Gardner: Seeing this relationship between business and IT shift and change, dealing with complexity across variety of different levels, looking for that right analysis and information in that sea of data, where do you think the management, the definition of management goes?

Are we talking about an expanded definition of management or the role of IT? If you can manage IT, does that mean you can better manage the business? Is there a coming together of managing IT and managing a business?

Veghte: This has been illustrated time and time again. The most successful businesses have figured out how to constructively apply IT to run a business.

IT tools are at such a maturity and the experiences of IT with the customer experience are so intermingled. The CIO at Delta Air Lines was talking yesterday about her utilization of HP technologies and some of the remarkable projects that she's been through. You listen to that talk and you realize that the reservation system, the way I check in, and my experience with Delta Air Lines is commingled with what you and I would characterize as the IT experience.

It was a remarkable story about that interrelationship with the business, as they were not only dealing with the broad adversity of the business climate, but also were trying to merge with Northwest Airlines.

Gardner: Perhaps we could go as far as to say that for many business over time, IT is the business.

Veghte: Dana, the trick in that is that IT means many different things to many people. The thing I would highlight is that IT has the ability to continue to outsource a variety of baseline capabilities. With that outsourcing capability, as an industry, IT providers, are going to be able to provide more and more. And that gives IT the ability to move up the stack in terms of higher value-add applications and services, and then the business runs through and with IT.

Gardner: So, maybe we could expand it to say, managing the services through IT is the business -- or some combination of the service model?

Veghte: You're a smarter analyst than I am. All I know is that the intersection between the two -- and the resulting customer experience -- continues to accelerate. We look forward, as part of HP Software & Solutions, to playing a great role in helping customers deliver those solutions and those experiences.

Gardner: Well, great. Thank you. We've been talking with Bill Veghte, Executive Vice President of HP Software & Solutions. Thank you so much, Bill.

Veghte: Great. Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: And, we want to thank our audience for joining us for this special BriefingsDirect podcast, coming to you from the HP Software Universe 2010 Conference in Washington. Look for other podcasts from this HP event on the hp.com website, as well as via the BriefingsDirect Network.

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this series of Software Universe Live discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast with HP's Executive Vice President Bill Veghte on managing change in IT as virtualization, cloud and mobility gain importance. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2010. All rights reserved.

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Tuesday, June 15, 2010

HP's Robin Purohit Unpacks Business Service Management 9 as Way to Address Complexity in Hybrid Data Centers

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast with HP's Software Products General Manager Robin Purohit on managing software and services in an increasingly chaotic environment.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series, coming to you from the HP Software Universe 2010 Conference in Washington D.C. We're here the week of June 14, 2010, to explore some major enterprise software and solutions trends and innovations making news across HP’s ecosystem of customers, partners, and developers.

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions and I'll be your host throughout this series of HP sponsored Software Universe Live discussions.

We're now joined by Robin Purohit, Vice President and General Manager of the Software Products Business Unit for HP Software & Solutions. Welcome back to BriefingsDirect, Robin.

Robin Purohit: Great to talk to you again, Dana.

Gardner: You know we're seeing a lot of changes in the market, and this whole notion of management to me seems to be exploding. There are just so many moving parts. People in these larger organizations are expected to manage software and services, manage them on- and off-premises, and also managing more up and down the development-to-operations life-cycle. Tell me how this complexity is being handled. How are enterprises beginning to adjust to this larger scope and definition of management?

Purohit: Our customers are dealing with some of the most significant combination of changes in IT technologies and paradigms that I had ever seen. There's a whole new way of developing applications like Agile development, the real acceleration of virtualization from your desktop and test environments to production workloads, and all the evaluations of where the cloud and software as a service (SaaS) fits and how that supports the enterprise applications.

All these things and more are colliding at once. What customers are saying is, "How do we take advantage of these new technology shifts and new ways of dealing with technology to get dramatic impact in cost, but not increase the risk? How can I do things faster and cheaper, but do things right?"

What they're looking for is a way to somehow simplify and automate the use of all these technologies and their processes using management software, so they get the most they can of these new paradigm shifts, while they keep up what the business wants them to do.

Gardner: Depending on the type of organization, within enterprises, within different units, there seems an emphasis on, "Let's try to use public clouds as best we can." Other are saying, "No, we really want to focus on building a private or on-premises cloud capability." Surely, hybrids are growing more common in many different permutations across these different organizations, and within them. From your perspective, how important is addressing the management issue about hybrid computing?

Purohit: First of all, I’d say that, compared to a year ago, the active interest of our clients in cloud computing has just exploded. Last year was a curiosity for many senior IT executives. It was something on the horizon, but this year there's really an active evaluation.

Most customers are looking initially at something a little safer, meaning a private cloud approach, where there is either new stack of infrastructure and applications are run for them by somebody else on their site or at some off-site operation. That seems to be the predominant paradigm.

Piece of a puzzle

The challenge is that that set of cloud services, that private service, is really just a piece of a puzzle to run their business operation. It's usually slice of infrastructure or certain class of application that’s part of the larger critical business service for their company.

What they have to do is to figure out how to take advantage of that, target the right workload where it's okay to take that risk, select the right partner, but then make sure that all of the instrumentation of making sure they are getting what they wanted out of it is actually integrated with the rest of their operation. Otherwise, it's just another thing to manage.

Gardner: And, while they can control many of the aspects of these applications and data-sets in an on-premises or private cloud, they lose some of that control when they move outside. Perhaps management and governance will be the common bridge that allows them to feel that the risk is manageable.

Purohit: That’s right. Now, the big risk is that the business is moving so fast. They read all the articles in BusinessWeek and The Economist and ask their IT guys, "Why can't we do this?" They actually want IT to move faster to public cloud computing.

So, the challenge for IT is how they enable that level of innovation at the right pace, but make sure that it's all very well governed -- simple things like getting what we pay for in terms of performance, capability, and the capacity.

That whole notion of cloud governance is one of the most critical things to get right near term, so that the IT guys can keep up with the business guys.



We're sourcing some sort of elastic-like services. And, by the way, is that environment secure, so we're not putting the business at risk? Then, if I want to change to a different cloud provider or another private provider, how do I do that in a fairly nimble way, without having to re-architect everything that I have done.

That whole notion of cloud governance is one of the most critical things to get right near-term, so that the IT guys can keep up with the business guys, but all the risk is there, it's still going be on the line.

Gardner: As you mentioned earlier, Robin, the pressure on cost is still very high. Do you foresee that managing these issues about control and risk will also, at some point, help define, analyze, and ultimately control and reduce the total costs? Or are these even the same types of problems?

Purohit: It's important to look at where the costs are coming from. There are two really big cost drains in IT. One is that when they roll out your applications, the majority of the time, things don't work well when they initially roll something out. If you think of Agile and the pace at which now new application innovations are bring rolled out, it really means that you have to get things right the first time. The first thing is to tackle that problem, as you go to these hybrid models.

Chaotic environment

The second thing is that most companies still are trying to get a handle on a right way of simplifying and automating their operation in a very chaotic environment. A typical data center is dealing with 900 changes a month. They might get a million incidents over a couple months and each one of those incidents could cost up to $80 plus labor. So, you can just imagine how chaotic and expensive it is just to run day-by-day.

It's really critical for both, the hand-off of the applications to operation, as well as this running the daily operations. This is incredibly automated and simplified and all focused on the impact of all these things that the business wanted in the first place.

If we do that right and then make extensions into all of these same core processes to accommodate a SaaS model, a private cloud model, or even ultimately a public cloud model, without having to change all of that, you are going to be able to bridge from today to the future. You'll be getting all that benefit and actually keep reducing your cost, because you want to keep doing this innovation in a sustainable way.

Gardner: So, we’re into this environment of change and complexity and the pressure to gain control, reduce risk, and control cost. HP today has announced Business Service Management 9 (BSM9). Give us an overview of how that all shapes up and relates to this environment we have been discussing.

All of that together -- knowing how it's connected, what the health of it is, what's changing in it so, you can actually make sure it's all running exactly the way the business expects -- is really critical.



Purohit: Absolutely. This has been a great release, and we're incredibly proud of it. BSM 9 is our solution for end-to-end monitoring of services in the data center. It's been a great business for us, and we have a break-through release that we revealed to our customers this week.

It's anchored on what we call the runtime service model. A service model is basically a real-time map of everything from the business transactions of the businesses running to all of the software that makes up that composite applications for the service, and all of the infrastructure -- whether it be physical or virtual, on-premise or off-premise -- that supports all of that application.

All of that together -- knowing how it's connected, what the health of it is, what's changing in it so, you can actually make sure it's all running exactly the way the business expects -- is really critical.

If you can imagine what we've talked about with virtualization and the rate of change there, people optimizing virtual workloads, new application coming on as being fired in the data center with Agile and maybe some outsourced environments and private/public clouds, that service model better be real time and up to date all the time.

That’s the real break through. Before we had a service model that was really linked to the configuration that we thought was running. Now that they have everything up to date in real time with all of this increased velocity, it's really critical.

So, we've rolled that out, and it's now the backbone for all of our end-to-end monitoring. The other thing I'd stress is that once you have that, especially, in this very fast-paced environment, you can really increase the levels of automation.

What you've seen before

When you detect an event, making sure you know exactly what was going on at the time of the event, you can help people diagnose it and probably help solve it, because most of the times these things are based on what you've seen before.

We've taken all of our world-class automation technology, wrapped right into this end-to-end monitoring solution to automate everything possible. We think this can drive dramatic reduction in the cost of operations.

The last thing, I’d emphasize is that there are a lot of people involved in solving these problems, and running these operations. What’s important is that all of them have a very personalized UI that looks and feels like a modern application, but os all based on one version of the truth of what’s going on. We made major improvements, just overhauling the way all of this is presented in a very rich Web 2.0 way, but also in a way that’s targeted to the needs of every single user in operations.

Gardner: So, you’ve announced some software, some services, this collaboration issue, and some new partnerships developing the ecosystem as well. It sounds as if you are allowing more variability in this run-time environment, but creating more commonality in the management layer or capability and then extending that both outward to the environment then letting the automation, then come back in, in terms of self-management. Is that a fair assessment?

Purohit: Right. That’s the trick. Again, there are a lot of people involved in running these business-critical services. You want to personalize it for them but you also want to simplify what you provide to them and make sure all is accurate in real-time. We try to solve both problems at once, the simplification of the user-experience and making sure that their criticality what we are showing them is all is up-to-date and accurate.

There are a lot of people involved in running these business-critical services. You want to personalize it for them but you also want to simplify what you provide to them and make sure all is accurate in real-time.



Gardner: What has been some of the response? What are you hearing from the customers, from the folks you are talking to? Do they seem to feel that the solution set that you're providing is aligned with their problems?

Purohit: Absolutely. We had a couple of really great customers speak to the solutions this week. Boeing is a big customer, and has actually has been a longtime user of BSM from us. They've gotten some massive improvements in their service level agreements (SLAs). They basically were in a condition red. Now, they're well over 98 or 99 percent of SLAs, and they've been able to save over the previous solution more than $1 million dollars in cost and have seen reductions in repair time from 10 hours to 1 hour.

That’s even at the current solution. What they have told us as part of our Beta program is that this is going to take it to a whole other level. I can’t quantify the impact, but they're going to see an ability to take on these new technologies and all these great gains that they had with the previous release are just going to get better and better.

That was a great success, and we also had Sprint on stage with us to talk to our customers about their evaluation of the product, and they're incredibly excited. You can imagine that telcos have all sorts of pressures on both cost and agility right now in a highly competitive environment.

Customers like Sprint could have a very dynamic experience. We can run part of this for them with our SaaS offering and they can monitor internally. Or, they can have a cloud provider running part of their network or business partner, and they really don’t know how to change the way that they are going to operate. So we think that our customers’ validity is a huge step-forward.

Gardner: These are two different types of customer, an enterprise and a service provider. As HP helps the cloud providers build out their clouds, if there is a common approach methodology, understanding even culture around the management both in the enterprises and the cloud providers, doesn’t that provide really a whole greater than the sum of the parts, when it comes to managing the entire lifecycle?

Adapt and morph

Purohit: That's right. What we haven’t touched on too much on is that what we're trying to do in HP is not just worry about the data center. We're trying to help customers really adapt and morph these applications into the new world. Most customers are shifting their IT focus on innovating around the application. This means that more of their people who they have internally are creating new IT in the form of a new application for a sales person or new customer-facing portal. That’s going to drive more revenue.

What we're really trying to do is to help them bridge that world, which is very innovation centric, into this new hybrid world, which has to be very operationally tight. A couple of things that we have also announced this week have gotten great feedback. One is a new capability called Application Deployment Manager, which is basically an extension to our industry relating automation capabilities.

That’s going to allow us to bridge all that upstream innovation, make sure it’s designed and tested correctly, then hand it off in an automated way into production, and run on these new optimized hybrid environment.



It really allows development, QA, and operations to coordinate hand-offs of applications in a very well prescribed way, so that they can make sure that what they designed gets handed off and rolled out into the production environment in a very crisp automated way and a way that represents the best practices and everything that’s been learned in a QA cycle. That was a big step forward.

We've also worked up-stream. We've extended our Quality Management Solution to tackle the requirements problem, linking business developers and QA together, and opened up that environment, so that it's much easier to integrate with source code management tools and development tools from folks like CollabNet.

CollabNet is one of the industry's leading development tools providers. As announced, we've integrated with that new open interface. We also support any software out there in that environment. That’s going to allow us to bridge all that upstream innovation, make sure it’s designed and tested correctly, then hand it off in an automated way into production, and run on these new optimized hybrid environment. So, we really are talking about the whole problem, which is really the thing that our customers are most excited about.

Gardner: Now, Robin, you've been involved with these issues for some time. I remember back not too long ago, when just getting visibility into a distributed computing environment that you completely controlled, was considered a very big deal.

How important is this to you personally -- this notion of being able to gain visibility, apply management, and then automate?

Purohit: For me, this release is an extremely proud moment. This has been the vision that we've had for some time, particularly around BSM 9, being able to bring all these points of monitoring information together into a simple, powerful way to solve those big business problem. What’s changed though is that the necessity to do that now in this new, rapidly changing environment. So, all this new technology becomes even more important to our customers.

For us, particularly, BSM 9 is vision being turned into reality at just the right time for our customers. That’s really the most exciting thing for me about what we did this week.

Gardner: Well, thank you so much for joining us. We've been talking about HP BSM 9.0 with Robin Purohit, Vice President and General Manager of the Software Products Business Unit for HP Software & Solutions. I know you've been very busy here at the show. I appreciate your input and good luck.

Purohit: Alright, Dana, thanks again.

Gardner: And thanks for you to our audience for joining us for this special BriefingsDirect podcast, coming to you from the HP Software Universe 2010 Conference in Washington D.C.

Look for other podcasts in this HP event series on the hp.com website, as well as via the BriefingsDirect Network. This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this series of Software Universe Live discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast with HP's Software Products General Manager Robin Purohit on managing software and services in an increasingly chaotic environment. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2010. All rights reserved.

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HP's Anton Knolmar on Seeking Innovations to Enterprise IT Challenges at Software Universe Conference

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast with HP's Anton Knolmar on the innovations and customer outreach from software conference in Washington, DC.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series, coming to you from the HP Software Universe 2010 Conference in Washington D.C. We're here the week of June 14, 2010, to explore some major enterprise software and solutions trends and innovations making news across HP’s ecosystem of customers, partners, and developers.

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions and I'll be your host throughout this series of HP sponsored Software Universe Live discussions.

We're now joined by Anton Knolmar, Vice President of Marketing for HP Software & Solutions. Welcome to the podcast, Anton.

Anton Knolmar: Hi, Dana.

Gardner: You're welcoming folks to the show, there’s a very big crowd here in Washington, in a new facility. Tell us a little bit about what is exciting and new for our attendees and why this is a particularly big event for HP.

Knolmar: HP Software Universe has quite a history. It’s not the first time that we're running this. A big thing for this year, especially for Americans, is that we're moving out of Las Vegas, where we were for the last couple of years, to Washington.

First, we wanted to get a different staging and we wanted to attract our public-sector customers. That’s an important thing for us, because we do a lot of business here. That’s one of the reasons we've moved to Washington.

We're really excited, as we have a fully packed agenda from Tuesday until Friday with mainstage sessions and 200 track sessions. We have a dedicated Executive Track and we have a combined solution showcase, where we have our HP product experts, our service professionals, and our key partners together.

We have awards of excellence and partner summits. So, we're really trying to get the entire ecosystem that has already deployed our solutions, from a customer and a partner perspective here, but also prospects in Washington. I'm happy to tell you that all the hotel rooms are booked. So, we're fully packed in the middle of Washington to try to bring across the best of what we have from our Software and Solutions portfolio.

Gardner: And, this event is happening, I think, at a fairly auspicious time. There’s a lot going on in the industry. Many people are referring to it as an inflection point. Why do you think this is an important juncture in the evolution of IT and business?

Knolmar: As you said, there are a lot of things going on at the moment around virtualization, cloud, outsourcing, on-premise, off-premise. I think that over the next five or six years, there will be an even greater disruptions in how organizations adopt and use technology.

If you look around, there are a couple of facts which are really critical. There will be a 100 percent increase in the number of virtual machines from 2009 to 2012 and a 43 percent growth in virtualized applications. Mobile devices will grow even more.

A lot of things are happening at the moment around those different areas, around mobile devices, cloud, and virtualization, as well as around the information explosion for the foreseeable future.

Ahead of the game

D
efinitely, from an HP and from an HP Software & Solutions perspective, we want to be ahead of this game and provide the appropriate level for our customers, so that they can be future ready with whatever we provide them. They can deploy it. They can deploy it better. They can deploy it more simply. They can integrate more simply. And, they can use this stuff to give them, our customers, a competitive advantage against their competitors.

Gardner: One of the things I hear a lot in the field is a concern about how to control and manage the complexity that’s going on. As I look at various new sourcing opportunities, perhaps adopting some cloud models themselves, they're worried about the issue of governance. Is that another big part of the picture today?

Knolmar: It's definitely a big part of the picture, because technologies like virtualization and cloud, which we just discussed, represent the biggest disruption in the technology environment since client-server.

But, unlike client-server, the entire enterprise is not just going on one service delivery method or another. We believe that enterprises will have hybrid technologies, as well as a hybrid application environment.

This hybrid environment will be created from enterprise sourcing services from a variety of service delivery models. It will require a set of tools that can manage the service irrespective of where it comes from, either from in-house, physical, virtual, outsource, or via the cloud.

These new delivery models will be directly related to how they can manage and how they can automate them, irrespective of where they are sourced or where they are running.



The ability to benefit from these advances is where our customers are struggling. These new delivery models will be directly related to how they can manage and how they can automate them, irrespective of where they are sourced or where they are running.

That’s one key piece of our announcement. What we can get across from this event in Washington is to explain our customers how we can help them to speed up time-to-innovation by reducing the risk. On the other hand, they can get ready by building a management environment that is ready for the next big thing.

Also, we can explain to our customers how we can simplify, integrate, and automate to gain, as I mentioned before, a competitive advantage from the new technologies. What’s clear to everyone is that one size fits no one. So, enterprises will need to have multiple sourcing options for their applications.

Gardner: Of course, to that same thought, community effect is quite prominent nowadays. Events like this certainly give people opportunity to get together, do some brainstorming, compare notes, and learn from each other. So, we're certainly looking forward to these mainstage events and hearing the news from HP. Tell me, if you could, how these events tend to enliven the community itself.

Knolmar: I think what those events offer to us is the two-pronged approach that we're seeing at the moment. Definitely, it’s our biggest user gathering, and what we're trying to do is get live customers together face-to-face. But, that’s only one piece.

What we're also doing for the first time is web streaming our content to different parts of the world, so that we really can reach out much more broadly. We're also building up a kind of HP Software & Solutions community. We have other ways of doing this and are using the social media capabilities as well. [Search for conference goings-on at Twitter on #HPSWU.]

We're connecting our customer community in a better way to bring those pieces together, even the different persona levels. Basically, we're drilling down from a CIO level, via the VP or IT manager, down to the other areas, where we have more of a practitioner level.

For this show specifically, people can even follow us on Twitter and on Facebook. It’s really a big thing for us to be investing in these kinds of new areas and reaching out as broadly as we can do here to the different target audiences and using all these new capabilities which are out there.

Gardner: Well, great. I'm certainly looking forward to hearing more about the show as it unfolds over the next several days. I want to thank you for joining us. We've been here with Anton Knolmar, Vice President of Marketing for HP Software & Solutions, learning about what to expect at the Software Universe Conference. Thank you, Anton.

Knolmar: Thank you.

Gardner: And, thanks to our audience for joining us for this special BriefingsDirect podcast, coming to you from the HP Software Universe 2010 Conference in Washington, DC. Look for other podcasts from this HP event on the hp.com website, as well as via the BriefingsDirect network.

I'm Dana Gardner; Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this series of HP sponsored Software Universe Live discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast with HP's Anton Knolmar on the innovations and customer outreach from software conference in Washington, DC. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2010. All rights reserved.

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