In an interview, Todd DeLaughter, vice-president and
general manager of the Management Software Organisation at
Hewlett-Packard, talked about the company's on-demand strategy,
which it calls the adaptive enterprise.
He also weighed in on HP's competitors and spoke about a new HP
Technical User Conference scheduled for the autumn of 2005.
How did HP get started with its adaptive enterpise
strategy?
"Adaptive enterprise is a vision of taking customers toward the
synchronisation of IT with business directives. Part of that
implies being able to respond to changes in a more rapid fashion.
It is a bold vision, and there are many steps along the path. And
it is not going to be one-stop shopping.
"We have been on this strategy for about two years, so it
started around the time of the Compaq acquisition by HP.
"Internally, we saw challenges for our massively large companies
and the changes inherent in bringing systems and people together.
That resulted in discussions [about] the amount of money required
to just do maintenance on IT systems.
"When we started, we were at about 70% of our budget spent on IT
maintenance, and through steps we have evolved our IT organisation
to flip that around, so that we have a target in the first year of
spending 45% on maintenance and 55% on new growth in IT
initiatives.
"We're driving toward a goal of 30% on maintenance and 70% for
new growth and we think that's an achievable goal for our
customers, based on what we do internally.
"When you deal with large systems, such as one with 230,000
e-mail accounts, a key element is process change. IT is seen as a
service through IT service management and ITIL [Information
Technology Infrastructure Library] standards management, which is a
European-led initiative and has come to North America.
"Clearly, there are steps in evolving the organisational view,
but once you have that in place, there is a series of things you
need to do, from the product standpoint, to help business get in
alignment with services.
"Our HP OpenView Service Desk product is an example, which has a
central representation of all the configuration information in a
system, which allows an end-to-end view of the system. Going
forward, all our products will leverage a common object model
approach, and the advantage is to have a single view of the
data.
"After that is a service management level, which responds to the
need to connect a service to business drivers, showing a business
how an IT infrastructure is allowing it to succeed or [what is]
blocking it from succeeding. A lot of people in the industry are
talking about this, but it's not necessarily being achieved.
"In our approach to business process modeling, customers work
with the Accentures of the world to model business processes, and
we help them to understand how steps in the process depend on the
infrastructure, such that if a step fails, we can tell what kind of
revenue impact there will be."
Is this where your business process insight comes into
play?
"We announced OpenView Business Process Insight in June, and
announced that Swisscom is working with it. With BPI in that
environment, we had modeled the IT impact against a business
process in two to three days.
"With BPI, Swisscom found that a credit check on [its] customers
was failing 25% of the time and was causing a [ninefold] delay in
getting new users online.
"Once you are able to connect the IT infrastructure back to
business needs, you start giving back knowledge so the business
managers understand how to modify the systems. And the next step is
to do that in a more automated fashion, whether through servers or
applications. That's where this is going. Nobody is there today,
but it's the state we want to drive toward."
How is HP going to make the next group of
products?
"We will be building [them] ourselves, or partnering or
acquiring. Our acquisition path has included six companies: Talking
Blocks, Baltimore Technologies, Trulogica, Novadigm, Consera and
Persist Technologies."
How soon will we see more automated processes, as you
mentioned?
"That will happen over the next year to 18 months, although
there are certainly solutions from HP today that address the notion
of virtualisation of resources.
"HP's Utility Data Center (UDC) product is offered to do this,
which is a scalable high-end solution that lets organisations
virtualise storage and reconfigure it as business needs turn
around."
What does HP plan to do with UDC?
"UDC is a committed product and on our road map. We are looking
to bring value and benefits toward a larger customer base by making
it more affordable."
How is HP doing compared to other suppliers with
on-demand products?
"There a lot of comparisons between us and IBM. Certainly we
think that management software is the next frontier for IT, so
there are a lot of management suppliers, but we are really the two
most focused.
"The strength of HP's services organisation and HP's software
portfolio brings us into a two-horse race [between] HP and IBM. We
feel we have the edge on software and architecture.
"The Talking Blocks Service Oriented Architecture is a key part
as we go forward, and IBM has nothing in this space while we
actually deliver on that today.
"When it comes to management of the mainframe, that's not really
a problem that needs to be solved. We can tap information from the
mainframe environment, but the bigger problem is end-to-end service
management and modeling, and that's an area where IBM has fallen
short."
HP has announced a new conference for September 2005
that will bring together technical sessions on HP software and
hardware. How is the management software portion of this new show
different from the current show known as the HP Software
Forum?
"The Software User Forum is a very focused audience [and is]
sponsored by the OpenView users group, and that group is typically
using products at the operational level. They are also focused on
the current product and how to use it.
"That is a bit different from the CIO level that will be a focus
of the new conference. It will address customers who are aware of
business challenges and the architecture revolution. CIOs have to
act as the compliance officer with Sarbanes-Oxley, for example, and
that role will increase over the years."
In a Computerworld survey conducted in the spring, users
said they were worried that on-demand software would be sold by
suppliers to lock in customers to that supplier's products. How do
you react?
"We have a very heterogeneous strategy. The OpenView naming
really applies. We're driven entirely by what customers use in
their systems. Expect to see us interoperate well. We're oriented
around building blocks. We can certainly adapt."
Matt Hamblen writes for
Computerworld