HP Targets Midsized Companies "Ten-To-One" Management Initiative

HP has introduced what it calls its "ten-to-one initiative," a combination of offerings to facilitate cloud computing, simplify risk management and infrastructure monitoring and strengthen HP channel partners that work with organizations with 1,000 to 10,000 employees. This in response to what HP sees as an under-served market of midsized companies that have increasingly complex IT systems but lack the internal IT staff of larger enterprises. It also sees a $7.5 billion market worth pursuing with new software and services.

HP's target organizations typically have IT staff of 30 to more more than 300 people, much smaller than the IT staff of larger enterprises, said Paul Muller, vice president of Strategic Marketing for software products in HP's Storage and Solutions business unit. "They tend to have people who are more generalists in nature, rather than in distinct autonomous departments with specific aspects of IT management," Muller said.

The initiative is backed up by HP-commissioned research from Forrester Consulting that shows, for instance, that half of midsized enterprises surveyed are planning to get into cloud computing, versus just 29 percent of large enterprises. That's likely because midsized companies can more easily afford cloud services than the expense of building their own infrastructure, Muller said. HP is creating HP Commercial Solutions within Software and Solutions to carry out the initiative.

Among the offerings is HP LoadRunner in the Cloud, a cloud performance testing and monitoring service offered through Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud service, one of the leading cloud service providers. LoadRunner, currently available as a free beta in the U.S., will be offered on-demand, meaning users will pay-as-you-go for the service. It has yet to be determined how long the beta period will last, said Muller. The survey also identified security and risk management as key concerns for midsized enterprises, so the initiative includes the enhanced HP Data Protector that offers eight methods of protection in environments running Hyper-V, Microsoft's virtualization hypervisor.

For monitoring the overall IT infrastructure, HP is also introducing the SiteScope Operations Manager to better ensure service availability and performance through system monitoring. The company is also giving channel partners more tools to serve midsized customers with a Campaign Syndication Service that gives partners access to HP marketing and training material and other collateral that they can co-brand to market their own services.