InfoWorld CTO 25: Russell Daniels

As CTO and vice president of HP’s software business, Russell Daniels has a service-oriented perspective normally associated with applications -- rather than, say, his flagship OpenView product.

“Historically, the enterprise management category was viewed as network and systems monitoring, and not much else,” Daniels says. But today, he argues, it should be viewed as a way to manage IT assets and services -- and measure their effectiveness in furthering an organization’s business goals.

Daniels also co-leads the company’s Adaptive Enterprise initiative, which combines virtualization with various datacenter automation technologies to form a malleable foundation for service-oriented IT. The automation efforts are focused, he says, on activities that, when done manually, tend to inject errors into systems. The ultimate objective is for enterprises to spend less on operations and more on innovation.

Although his background is in software development (including work on Web services standards), and he embraces the intricacies of datacenter management, Daniels is keenly aware that technology must always prove its value: “We have to be able to understand the performance of computing systems in business metrics, not IT metrics.”