At Discover 2012, HP announced several enhancements across its enterprise products portfolio. The key words for the company: convergence, cloud, agility and simplicity
By Heena Jhingan
Despite a slow start this fiscal, IT giant HP is optimistic about the quarters ahead. The company is hopeful of getting a boost with the new set of solutions that it announced at Discover 2012 in Frankfurt that was attended by about 9,000 participants from across the world.
HP CEO Meg Whitman, who took the reins of the company about a year back, observed a tectonic shift in the way technology is now being accessed and consumed. A new style of IT is emerging that demands innovations to happen around simplicity, agility, speed and cost. The pan HP strategy to capitalise on these trends is focused around Cloud, information optimization, and security. Whitman also stressed on the company’s commitment to Autonomy, saying that it will be central to all future plans.
In tune with its business design, HP announced developments to its converged storage, information optimisation, converged Cloud and printing & personal systems.
Looking to beef up its converged storage and eliminate complexities and inefficiencies with a single architecture for all sizes of client deployments, HP fielded new HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage, HP StoreAll Storage and HP StoreOnce Backup product offerings.
The new HP 3PAR StoreServ 7000 Storage is being projected to be the industry’s only mid-range quad-controller platform offering Tier 1 storage availability and quality-of-service features at a lower entry price point for organisations. It supports both block and file data services. The system is also available with HDD and SSD or as an all-SSD configuration capable of performing more than 320,000 input/output operations per second—2.4 times that of a similarly priced competitive array.
Storage, data and Cloud
The company also announced HP StoreOnce 2000 and 4000 Backup with support for HP StoreOnce Catalyst software. These solutions provide efficient data movement and high-performance deduplication to reduce data protection costs in remote sites and data centers. The new models are being pitched to perform backup operations up to three times faster at a 35 % lower cost than the closest competitive systems in the market.
David Scott, senior vice president and general manager- Storage Division, HP, stressed that the legacy storage vendors are not equipped to help organisations respond to new workloads. HP’s Converged Storage innovations would help clients simplify infrastructure and reduce costs with a common architecture across storage segments and categories.
To address the need for configuring and deploying Big Data systems, the company expanded its AppSystems portfolio, offering extended capabilities of HP Converged Infrastructure with Apache Hadoop, HP Vertica Analytics Platform and Autonomy eDiscovery environments.
With new solutions from Autonomy and Vertica—both HP companies—coupled with new HP Converged Infrastructure solutions and service, HP aims to target businesses and governments to extract value from their structured, semi-structured and unstructured information. As per Nucleus Data, Analytics payback $10.66 for every dollar spent. HP thus plans to leverage the world’s ‘digital universe’ that is expected to reach 8 zettabytes by 2015.
Tracking the buzziest trend, Cloud, HP released enhancements to HP CloudSystem. Upbeat about the capability of HP Cloud System 7.2, allowing customers the flexibility to burst out to any Cloud, Bill Veghete, COO, HP, expected that the new solution will help HP increase its Cloud map by about 30%.
“The opportunity is fundamentally around the ability to unify the on-premise, the managed Cloud and the public Cloud environments so that the CIO has a choice and the enterprises have the flexibility to scale—that is what we have been discussing through our converged Cloud discussions,” said Ajei Gopal, Senior VP, HP Software.
Steven Dietch, vice president – Worldwide Cloud, Enterprise Group, HP, informed that the company had already partnered with service providers to offer Cloud. “Channel is fundamental to our business. Almost 70% of the total business comes through the channels,” he said.
Jim Merritt, senior vice president, Enterprise Group & Managing Director, HP- Asia Pacific and Japan, pointed that India was an important market and the new solutions will be instrumental for the company to further grow in the country and the region.
Fuelling the growth engine
Citing India as a growth engine in the region, Merritt said the country has been consistently providing good topline and HP will continue to invest here. In an attempt to propel growth in the region, HP had made some conscious changes to the organisational structure.
“We combined the enterprise group with the global accounts. We have also expelled complexities in several decision points, something very important to makes the company more responsive to the customers, partners and streamline the enterprise skeleton. We moved more authority at the country level. This delegation helps the country heads take better informed decisions that are critical for the company’s growth in the respective markets,” he said.
Agreeing that India is a high potential market for the company, Neelam Dhawan, Managing Director, HP India Sales, said that emerging technology trends are compelling the enterprises to further invest in IT and giving way to new opportunities. The gradually sprawling virtual and Cloud environments are leading the way for SMBs and mid market firms to put their money in IT and this will help HP write a new chapter in its growth story.
“The recently announced StoreServ 7000 is meant for the mid market. If you look at the configurations, even the Gen 8 servers that we announced in October this year are also focused on this segment. So, a number of new product releases are targeted at this segment. The good news is that we did not have low end servers in the Gen 8 family; with these products we believe we will be able to penetrate the market better. Upcountry is a focus, which we believe we will be able to crack with the help of our partners.
“Traditionally, we haven’t done as well as we could have in the mid market. The focus always had been on the large enterprise business. These announcements that we have made allow us to address these m arkets at much lower price points,” Merritt added.
The company has great expectations from the India storage business, even though the country is predominantly a printer and PC market first.
Considering the size of the country, Dhawan said, the volumes of data that it churns is huge. Besides, government projects like Aadhar lead to a whole new paradigm of growth. HP services several government projects. A pertinent shift that is being observed in HP’s government business in India is the fact that it is no more just about hardware. There is a renewed focus on the solutions and for projects like the Accelerated Power Development and Reform Programme (APDRP) and the Crime and Criminal Tracking Network & Systems (CCTNS), the government has invested in complete solutions.
“The government is rethinking its IT infrastructure. They have already set a team for evaluating ways to deploy Cloud for the government applications. I believe this trend favours us, because of the convergence that is happening in the industry and the solutions we provide,” Dhawan said.
She added that Cloud will play a pivotal role in defining HP’s growth path in the country. In India, HP has already installed CloudSystems for more than 100 customers. The early adopters have been the enterprises seeking disaster recovery and the SMBs looking for services. Analysts expect HP Cloud business to be worth $2 bn by 2015, including products and services.
Dhawan signed off, saying that HP was doing well in India with its private Cloud offering, but the company had no immediate plans of opening up the public Cloud offering here. “The public Cloud is primarily meant for having applications subscriptions. In India, the model for us is such that we have partners like Airtel and Sify. At present we are not thinking of our public Cloud in India, as Airtel has already rolled out Cloud 365 and Sify has a PaaS offering. The players like AllTimeIT Solutions have taken solutions for SMBs and micro verticals and put them on the Cloud. We will continue to focus on our strengths to drive growth.”
