HP Technology@Work on Tour 2011 (part 3)

Looking back on the business day

It’s always difficult to contemplate when you are right in the middle of something. Now that I have returned from the Madrid edition of HP’s Technology@Work on Tour 2011, I had some time to think what was remarkable, promising, disappointing or difficult to grasp.

As an invited but independent industry blogger it is not directly my intention to make or break what was presented at the event. Some of the things I found remarkable have already been tweeted under the #HPTAW hashtag. In this blog I am happy to use more than 140 characters to further detail my observations.

Before I arrived I was fully aware that the first day of the event would focus on the business side and that the second day would have a more technical focus.

Although I have not counted, I estimated there were approximately 700 visitors on the first day. The second day of technical sessions attracted about 400 visitors. It was difficult to tell whether the visitors of the second day also attended on the first day, but my guess is that business and technically oriented people still don’t mix very well.

Because I am personally more interested in the technical side of HP’s portfolio, I didn’t get all that much energy from the business oriented CloudSpeak. The keynote speakers did not only try to explain what cloud really meant and what flavor clouds were available, but primarily wanted to emphasize the strengths and business opportunities of HP’s portfolio and services surrounding the converged datacenter.

There is no doubt in my mind that HP has all the top gear to make a cloud tick really well, whether it be a private cloud with HP BladeSystem, HP BladeSystem Matrix, HP CloudMaps and HP 3PAR CloudStorage, or deployed in the form factor of the Performance-Optimized Datacenter (POD), the perfect solution for a rapidly deployed private cloud (on the parking place) and the building block (on a truck) for the public cloud as deployed in the jumbo size datacenters of the global cloud providers. 

So what are the key takeaways for the CIO and IT manager:

• HP is the best equipped partner in the industry on this planet to be their private cloud partner.
• There is no need to worry about security, availability, performance, openness, flexibility, elasticity or scalability of HP’s CloudSystem proposition.
• HP is not only leading in the server and storage domain but also makes a formidable partner in the networking arena.
• Applications and Services encompass the entire lifecycle of both hardware and software, whether they be physical or virtual.
• Partnerships with Microsoft, VMware, Citrix, SAP, Oracle, Intel and AMD remain fruitful and guarantee a fully managed heterogeneous converged infrastructure.
• It is quite feasible to start converting and replacing existing infrastructure to HP BladeSystem Matrix and begin building a private cloud using the freely available collection of sizers, fast-tracks, templates, workflows, cloud maps and best practices.

The HP CloudSystem approach will:

• Accelerate application deployment not only resulting in faster time to business but even accelerated time to profit.
• Ready for business in weeks, not in months or even years.
• Reduce cost because of standardization, virtualization, automation and orchestration.
• Facilitate fast growth and the ability to burst to the public cloud for practically unlimited datacenter resources.

The business oriented keynotes aimed to stress that cloud is no longer a hype but is here to stay: "Let’s just start using it". If done right and in time, HP’s approach might even avoid cloud sprawl. There are signs that IT cannot keep up with Business any longer. IT departments are being surpassed and individual stakeholders go and order infrastructure and applications from multiple cloud providers. Enterprises should seize control again by embracing a unified and enterprise wide cloud strategy.

This is exactly what HP considers itself capable of. However, it is up to the customer to actually buy that message. Enterprises have a choice of ignoring cloud, build a cloud of their own, fully roll out HP’s CloudSystem or combine it with cloud technology from other vendors such as Microsoft, VMware, Google, or Amazon to mention a few.

The era of the agile datacenter that was based on standardization, consolidation and virtualization has eventually transformed into the converged datacenter. HP’s Converged Infrastructure is a core component of an Instant-On Enterprise embedding all necessary technology to serve their users, partners and clients.

It would be interesting to see where HP’s CloudSystem will be positioned in Gartner’s next Hype Cycle.