PALO ALTO, Ca. – Helping chief information officers perform their job better with an array of new management tools at hand is the primary goal of HP Software, Thomas Hogan, senior vice president at HP Software, recently told a group of reporters in Toronto.
“What we are here to do is help the CIO drive better business outcomes from the total envelope of investment in IT information,” Hogan said.
“What about bringing a suite of solutions for the CIO, who by the way has got the most complex job on the planet? It is getting more complicated and challenging everyday.”
How about if we actually applied technology to help him or her do their jobs better,” he continued.
Lately, HP Software has been introducing a number of products with this in mind, including the HP Data Center Transformation Center Transformation portfolio and its Neoview enterprise data warehouse.
HP aims to help CIOs apply further automation to take labor and the human element of error out of equation in the large enterprise data centers.
There are huge pressures to improve efficiency in the IT shops where headcount is a leading source of cost and the matter of managing provisioning and change across those different elements in the data center can be challenging, Hogan said.
“Every big customer is thinking about this theme of automation, for the reasons that I described.”
The impetus for HP stems from the efforts of CEO Mark Hurd to expand business for his company’s software division.
Quoting Hurd, Hogan stated that “software is an underleveraged asset in the IT portfolio and it is a huge opportunity for HP.”
HP is still saddled with the perception in the market that it is primarily the provider of PCs, printers and servers, even if one billion of its 100 billion plus revenue comes from its software sales, Hogan told reporters.
Even though HP is the sixth largest software company in the world, sitting behind giants like Microsoft and IBM, he noted, “there is a widespread view that HP needed to significantly expand its IT in both software and professional services.”
HP Software’s focus is reflected in the direction of its major acquisitions including the high profile takeover of Mercury Software about 18 months ago.
Software is the bigger revenue generator among all of HP’s major lines of business. Its operating margins are in the 30 per cent range compared to a struggling five per cent for computer hardware, Hogan noted.
At a time when IT has gone beyond being a mere “enabler” to becoming central to many organizations, HP Software has no interest in competing with the likes of SAP or Oracle in the market for packaged applications, he told reporters.
“A lot of software for the CIO doesn’t help him or her, and they add more cost and complexity to their job,” stated Hogan.
Rather, HP Software is looking to ramp up solutions for areas like business technology optimization which entails management of infrastructure (systems, servers and storage devices), networks and applications.
The other major area at HP Software for new products is business information optimization which consists of two subcategories — business intelligence and information management.
The ultimate goal is help CIOs know who within the organization is responsible for what imputed data, which stated Hogan, would fix “80 per cent” of all corporate legal compliance difficulties.
The other long term aim is the ability to rely upon simple queries to answer questions stemming from the myriad of electronically stored unstructured internal corporate data, he added.
This column was written by Paul Weinberg of ConnecTech
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