HP Breaks Innovation Gridlock With New Offerings

HP has a term for the burden of IT operational costs that prevent companies from using technology to create new products and grow their business: "innovation gridlock."
The technology giant is today unveiling a multi-part strategy to break innovation gridlock with new services, servers, software and cloud computing initiatives.

The strategy evolved from a survey HP commissioned of business executives, 60 percent of whom lament that most of their IT budgets are spent maintaining their existing IT infrastructure, replacing or repairing servers, patching software and putting out other IT fires. "This gridlock is really a problem that's preventing their organizations from keeping up with the competition and delivering value to their business partners," said Gerry Nolan, global mission-critical services director in the Technology Services Group at HP.  "We help them get back control of their environment."

Among the service enhancements, called the HP Mission-Critical Partnership (MCP), is HP support for different virtualization hypervisors, including VMware, Microsoft's Hyper-V and Citrix Xen Server, Nolan said. In addition, HP will provide support for not just its x86 servers, but also those from rivals such as Dell and IBM.

HP is also expanding the menu of services available through its Proactive Select offering, allowing customers to use "service credits" to choose from 33 different service tasks.
"They may want help implementing VMware this week, and maybe next week they want some training on the blades and the next week they might need some help setting up Insight Control software," he explained.

Typically, HP MCP is a comprehensive set of support services for large enterprises in which HP is not only reactive about support needs, but proactive, going into an organization, studying its operations and suggesting improvements. Such level of support can cost $1 million or more a year, but some of those services are available individually through a service called Priority Connect. "They can buy access to the mission-critical expertise just on an incident basis," he explained.HP's goal is to reduce operational costs in order to free up IT budget dollars for innovation projects, added Jim Ganthier, vice president of marketing for HP ProLiant servers, two new models of which are also being introduced Tuesday. As with other ProLiants introduced earlier this year, the new DL 360 G7 and DL 380 G7, rack-mounted servers running Intel Xeon processors with list prices starting below $2,300, allow for server consolidation ratios of 20:1 over the ProLiant G4s they would likely replace in a typical server refresh cycle.

Other improvements in power management software and energy efficiency result in a reduction of up to 96 percent in the cost of energy and cooling, according to HP testing.
HP also claims a return-on-investment for such new servers of as little as two months, all of which saves money that can be diverted to new innovations, said Ganthier.
The new ProLiants are "the poster child for creating self-funding projects."
HP is also offering a new approach to help organizations move to cloud computing.

HP believes that more and more IT people and their bosses understand the fundamentals of cloud computing and recognize its value to their organizations, said Paul Muller, vice president of strategic marketing in HP's Software and Solutions business. Now, what customers need is specific advice and services on how to get the cloud computing solution that is tailored to their business. "What I think few of us have been prepared for is the pull coming from the business," said Muller. "I think IT is being dragged to the cloud party faster than they had anticipated because the business is saying 'We're more ready for this than we intially perceived.'" To help customers create their own private cloud or help service providers offer cloud computing, HP is offering cloud workshops, design services and helping to automate the process of moving IT to the cloud.

A survey conducted for HP by Coleman Parkes Research found that 95 percent of executives said that innovation gridlock resulted in "lost opportunities" for their organizations, and 70 percent said they were unable to invest in new technologies to meet new business needs because 70 percent of their IT budgets were tied up supporting mission-critical or legacy systems.