One year on from its acquisition of Compaq Computer,
Hewlett-Packard mapped out its plans for the future
yesterday.
HP's "adaptive enterprise" strategy touches all aspects of its
software, services and hardware portfolio. Emphasising automatic
management, straightforward integration, and architectural
flexibility, the approach echoes moves made lately by several of
HP's rivals, most notably IBM, which has been pursing a similar
strategy -"on-demand computing" - for months.
In a play on IBM's tagline "e-business on demand", HP chief
executive officer Carly Fiorina claimed that her company's adaptive
strategy is about demanding more.
"The truth is technology should be, and can be, understood in
terms of the results it delivers," she said. "It has to yield to
the demands of business."
HP's strategy centres around a reference architecture, called
Darwin, designed to integrate business processes with virtually
every enterprise product, service and standard that HP supports -
everything from J2EE to .net, to software from PeopleSoft and
SAP.
"The goal is to have infrastructure that is standardised and
modularised and integrated," said Fiorina.
Fiorina added that the challenges in merging the two companies'
operations had made HP stronger. "Like evolution, it's how a
company reacts and responds and adapts to change that's the
difference between competitive vulnerability and competitive
success."
She claimed that some of the ideas behind Darwin were developed
within HP as the company struggled to integrate the infrastructure
of 1,200 networked sites, 7,000 applications and 21,671 servers
that the merger created.
"Change presents opportunities," she said. "We are bringing to
market the distillation of the integration experience that we have
been through."
Fiorina added that since the merger, HP had reduced its own IT
costs by almost a quarter. "This is what we mean by demand
more."
An array of partners have lined up to support HP, including
Accenture, BEA Systems, BearingPoint, Cisco Systems, Deloitte
Consulting, Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP and Siebel Systems. With the
goal of simplifying systems management and integration at the heart
of its message, company executives say partnering will be key to
carrying out HP's vision.
As part of yesterday's event, HP announced 15 products and
services supporting its adaptive enterprise push. Among the
software offerings are HP Virtual Server Environment, a
virtualisation tool powered by an enhanced version of HP-UX
Workload Manager.
This software, available now as part of HP's Mission Critical
version of HP-UX, lets HP machines band together and add or reduce
the number of processors they are using, depending on application
requirements.
"The server gets bigger or smaller, depending on your workload,"
said HP director of utility computing Nick van der Zweep.
HP also announced Software Self-healing Services for HP
OpenView, which are intended to expand the dynamic allocation and
troubleshooting capabilities of HP's network management
software.
The self-healing services features will first be available for
HP's OpenView Operations and Network Node Manager, and will roll
out over time throughout the entire OpenView line.
Within the next 12 months, HP will introduce
adaptive-enterprise-themed enhancements in the areas of
virtualisation, automatic provisioning, business impact analysis,
service-level agreements, dynamic deployment and maintenance of
management functions, policy-based IT flexibility, and service
lifecycle management.
Embedding itself deeply within its customers' IT infrastructures
is part of HP's game plan, and in launching its new vision, the
company made sure to highlight one of its biggest wins a $3bn
(£1.8bn), 10-year managed services contract with Procter &
Gamble.
Approximately 2,000 P&G employees from 48 countries will
become part of HP Services when the agreement commences on 1
August, pending regulatory approvals.
The P&G deal is one of more than 200 managed services
contracts HP has signed since acquiring Compaq.
HP's rivals were quick to cast the company's "adaptive
enterprise" campaign as a marketing manoeuvre posing as an
operating strategy.
"This is a repackaging of what we've seen come out over the last
few months," said Sun Microsystems manager of competitive strategy
Paul Phillips, adding that HP was aping IBM by putting "a big
banner out there they can later put anything they do
underneath".
Sun has also been emphasising a simplified, flexible approach to
IT management through its N1 initiative. While Sun took a "clean
slate" approach to fashioning N1, HP is shaping its strategy around
its existing OpenView line, according to Phillips.
"Our take on it is they are applying a somewhat old software
technology and methodology to what is a newer problem."
Computer Associates International, which spoke last week of its
own commitment to on-demand computing and related additions to its
Unicenter line of management software, said HP is too focused on
its own proprietary technology.
"It's obvious that HP's primary support is for HP. We don't see
any plans for their Virtual Server Environment to support any
non-HP platforms," said David Hochhauser, CA's vice president of
Unicenter marketing.
"Customers who also have IBM or Sun servers are going to have to
look to platform-neutral vendors like CA."
HP's plan is to extend the Virtual Server Environment to the
Windows and Linux operating systems, although an HP spokeswoman
said no timeframe was out yet on when the extension will be
available.
"This is our party, we set the table two years ago," said Doug
Frederick, executive vice president of Services supplier Electronic
Data Services. "Hardware vendors are pushing utility computing on
their terms, their hardware."
While HP executives claimed yesterday to be 18 months ahead of
the rest of the industry in implementing a true virtual datacentre,
analysts at the event said that in reality the differences between
HP and competitors like IBM are far less dramatic.
"It's almost like an arms race," said Forrester Research vice
president Bill Martorelli. "These things are long on vision. ... If
you want to remain viable as a large-scale supplier of IT, you have
to put together a road map first."