Interview: HP looks to OpenView for software future

HP not only wants to breathe new life into its venerable OpenView platform, the company is counting on it as its enterprise software lynchpin. Peter Blackmore, executive vice president for HP's Enterprise Systems Group, and Shane Robison, HP executive vice president and CTO, sat down with InfoWorld Executive News Editor Mark Jones and Technical Director Tom Yager to map out HP's software direction.

InfoWorld: What is the focus of HP's enterprise software business and what direction will you take moving forward?

Blackmore: Within the Enterprise Group we have four business units: business-critical solutions, the server group, enterprise storage -- which is the open SAN and the RAID arrays -- and software. The combination of those four businesses is about $16.5 billion and our R&D budget is slightly less than $1.8 billion. The six-month planning horizon tends to be "How do we meet our financial plan?" but also "How do we make sure the road map and development [follow] through?" The three-year planning horizon, where Shane [Robison is very] involved, is looking a bit longer. Shane [works] across the company so it's very valuable to me [to know] are we linking into this, that, and the other? Our industry is developing very fast, and when you're running a business you're focused on hitting numbers, not necessarily on where the next disruptive technology is coming [from]. 

Robison: We think about the enterprise business strategy as it impacts multiple business groups. We've got these two huge market segments -- consumer and enterprise -- and the challenge is how to articulate clear strategy to the enterprise market? It turns out that the software strategy is, in some ways, the point of the arrow for the enterprise strategy. We've got a very modularized, low-cost approach to putting together a solutions stack. Starting at the bottom, we've cleaned up our microprocessor road map and we have converged on a 32-bit and a 64-bit play. At the operating system level we had a lot of operating systems, but our focus is on NT, HP-UX, and Linux on top of our Itanium and IA32 strategy. At the middleware level we're going to partner with Microsoft, with BEA, with a couple of smaller market-share players -- Oracle and Iona and a few others. At the application level we'll partner with Oracle, with PeopleSoft, with SAP, with Siebel. The business applications are the drivers for the solution stack and, to some extent, for the architecture of the [IP] infrastructure. So partnering with them very closely and being able to qualify and verify and certify those and also wrap services around them is key.