Hewlett-Packard is to launch a set of products and services,
which it claims will help firms achieve better insight into their
business, faster application development and greater flexibility in
responding to market changes.
The announcement is the first indication of how HP plans to
exploit its
$13.9bn acquisition of IT services firm Electronic Data Systems
(EDS).
It comes in response to recent product announcements from
competitors Cisco and IBM aimed at enterprise customers.
HP has released an updated version of its Neoview Advantage
real-time data warehouse and business intelligence platform. "The
comparable competitor is Teradata," said Iain Stephen, director of
enterprise servers and storage for HP UK and Ireland.
Based on fault-tolerant hardware, Neoview can support thousands
of parallel input streams, Stephen said. The latest version is
based on HP blade servers, cutting its physical footprint and
running costs between 30% and 40% and boosting throughput by up to
40%, he said.
Stephen said HP is offering two ideas to increase firms'
"elasticity" or responsiveness to change.
One is the HP Converged Infrastructure architecture, which
offers firms better integration and management of server, storage
and network assets in virtualised environments, either on an
in-house or outsourced basis.
The other is a cloud computing offering, a legacy of the EDS
takeover. This allows firms to add processing and storage capacity
on an ad hoc basis, and to integrate applications and data from the
cloud transparently with in-house systems through an over-arching
information management system, Stephen said.
As examples, HP Enterprise
Services recently signed multi-year agreements with automaker
Nissan North America ,
Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications , and
Telstra, the Australian telecommunications company.
| Investing in innovation |
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Researchers for HP found that only 34% of global enterprise IT
budgets is dedicated to business innovation. "IT sprawl has created technology silos in datacentres so that
maintenance and operations consume up to two-thirds of the
technology budget," said HP's Stephen. Solving the issue of IT sprawl with converged infrastructure
solutions is expected to create a $35bn market opportunity by 2012,
he said. |