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
This whitepaper explains the terminology and concepts behind Data Replication technologies and establishes some sizing rules through worked examples. Learn the new paradigm in disaster tolerance—protect data anywhere.
Download now »Server virtualization is a popular option for dealing with mounting datacenter costs. Another equally promising approach is the use of an Application Delivery Controller. Citrix NetScaler provides a low-cost way for organizations to reduce their server count and accrue cost savings from a reduction in space, cooling, power and personnel.
Download now »
The emergence of WLANs has created a new breed of security threats to enterprise networks.
Included in HP ProCurve WLAN solutions is security technology that alleviates threats from WLANs through:
* Monitoring wireless activity inside and out of the enterprise
* Classifying WLAN transmissions into harmful and harmless
* Preventing transmissions that pose a security threat to the enterprise network
* Locating participating devices for physical remediation
Effectively address data protection challenges, implementing solutions that help store and protect businesscritical data while cutting costs and improving efficiency and reliability.
Download now »
Sign up to receive Platforms Resource Alerts
