HP's roadmap in India: John Knightly

HP Software Universe is one of HP's biggest enterprise software events held annually- bringing together clients, partners, executives, developers and engineers. This year, HP India hosted its first one in Dehradun and covered deep-dive sessions on big data, mobility, cloud and security.

Excerpts from the interview:

What are your hotspots in HP Software?

JK: HP software focuses on three big areas - IT management, security and big data/information management. 

We have been into IT management for the past 25 years- it is our mainstay offering. And within that, we have 2 components, IT Operation Management and Operation Testing. These two drive majority of our revenue. We see that the IT management in Indian market is growing at about 12-15 % (according to IDC).Vertica - the HP product in Big Data domain, and Security are growing far more aggressively. 

How is HP India doing in these three verticals- IT management, big data and security?

JK: The growth rates are different for these three domains and all three are important. IT management is important as it is our cash cow, and our focus continues to remain there as we see immense opportunity there. 

On Security and Vertica, we are relatively in new in the market and it's growing globally and in India much faster than the traditional IT management business. We expect the same trend to continue for 2013-14.

Testing is a big area today. How is HP positioned in testing market?

JK: Typically we are in number I and number II in most the markets.

AC: Testing services market globally is $16 billion, and 50% of it is outsourced to India. Testing as a service (TaaS) is a growth driver here and is one of our top priorities. Testing is an integral piece in the IT life cycle, and there are whole bunch of TaaS providers who partner with HP to offer solutions to their end customers. It is unique model to India. We enhance our partnership with companies like Mphasis, Infosys, iGate, Patni etc. India is a very prominent place, because of the volume game played from here.

What about availability of talent in testing?

A big amount of talent is available here in India. Companies like Cognizant, Wipro and TCS have massive testing practices and hence, talent is available in the domestic market easily. Talent acquisition is not a challenge. 

Testing has become so prominent that there are companies formed only to do testing. These are stand-alone testing services companies, and some of them are working with HP already. HP is not directly involved in the crowd sourcing of testing. We work with service providers.

What is HP doing to curb opportunities around agility?

JK: Agile development are in big demand today and we are addressing that trend with our Agile Manager product - a SaaS based offering that helps an agile development team manage and automate their development process. 

AC: There is a lot of interest in agile development this year we see definitely a pick of this business. People want to know how it will help them to automate their development process. This is because of the productivity development vs the Waterfall method. Agile development shortens development time, and time-to-market is a big issue for everyone these days. 

JK: DevOps is another HP offering which relates to agility, but spans to ADM and operations. It is a movement that brings together operations and development. It gets them to communicate and collaborate better, and at the core, makes sure that the ADM team deliver high quality software. 

Information is shared between the operations side and the ADM side. It may be more prominent when you talk to software development and services houses rather than earlier stages of talking to enterprises. We have some specific software offerings to help - Continuous Delivery Automation and Lab Management. These tools are used to automate the process so that it reduces the error rates and increases the speed for delivery into production.

AC: DevOps is at a very early stage in India. It is a solution that bridges both testing and solution. The testers are interested because its an easy way for them to hand over the code, while production guys are interested as they can re-mediate in an easier manner. Hence, we see lot of interest not only from the testing group but also from the traditional service providers. 

In the ADM market, is it more of overwriting legacy application or is more interest coming in writing new applications in cloud and mobility?

We can share some insight on this although we are not from the core ADM domain. Our's is more of automation, therefore we are more into tools that help expedite product development.

One of the trends that HP is working on is the trend of mobility, and that is one of our four main core focus area of HP today. The other three being cloud, information management and security. 

Today, the product development ratio of applications for client-server architecture to mobile is 3:1. In the next two years, we expect the equation to flip around- 3 apps will get developed for mobile and one will get developed on the server. That's the kind of dramatic shift we're seeing globally and in India.

What are your opportunities for growth in areas like cloud, information management and security?

JK: With respect to cloud, it is a simple value proposition. There is an ability to buy a smaller set of compute capacity. Talking about opportunities for HP, cloud is new for a lot of enterprises. They have many complexities in terms of existing investments in data centers and in applications. So, a lot of enterprises are turning to HP for advice. 

At the end of the day they use cloud to deliver applications and deliver information, and to do that successfully, you need to be able to monitor those applications. You need to secure them, you need to manage the infrastructure underneath the cloud. With our strength and IT management tools, we work and partner with them. Regardless of what platform they choose, they can use HP's platform, but they still need the tools to manage that. So, it's a good driver of our IT management business and our security business. 

AC: In India, the cloud market is going to go through an exponential growth. We have been talking about cloud for the last couple of years but there's more talk than substance. The market is in a low stage of maturity today. 

Increasingly, businesses will be under pressure and the IT budget is going to fall. CIOs should be innovative in managing their money. Typically 70% to 80% of their IT budget goes towards keeping the lights on - which is all the maintenance, contract etc. Only 20% to 30% of the budget is left for new projects and innovations. 

Cloud is at the heart of cutting that cost. Therefore, that value proposition for India is a very strong value proposition. People anticipate that this market will go to $3bn in India by 2015. 

Will this happen only when the legacy solutions and infrastructure finish their term?

AC: HP does not believe in junking existing infrastructure but encourages openness to adapt to whatever technology the client has. Secondly, we offer flexibility i.e. we don't necessarily say that you have to buy the entire gear from us. If you have middle ware on a different platform or tools, you are welcome to use it on top of our hardware. HP is the only large company that says that we will adapt whatever you have, we will be open and we will be flexible. 

The road map

AC: HP is currently in the phase of putting up its growth plans. The global leadership team is here and we are trying to plan out growth strategy in India, and part of that is coverage. Coverage does not mean that we will hire another 1000 people and put them in different cities. That's not how you do it. It has to be a combination of our own direct sales force combined with an indirect partnering model. 

Partnering is the key to succeed in India. One has to understand that India is predominantly an indirect market. If you know how to play the indirect game, then you are set up for success. This is not only for software but overall for HP. That will be a core part of our strategy to cover trends like big data and security.

HP has been acquiring many companies recently, including Vertica 2 years ago. How is that working out for you? What skills did HP acquire with these acquisitions?

JK: We are getting experts in some of the areas we didn't previously cover. Our strength for 25 years was IT management. With the Vertica acquisition, we are getting deep experts in algorithms around analytics and Big Data. 

With Security (ArcSight) acquisition, we are getting people with in-depth skills in security algorithms. We are expanding the breadth of what we can offer to the customers from a solutions perspective. 

Could you brief us on HP's converged infrastructure?

JK: Converged infrastructure is our strategy and message for bringing together the three main infrastructure components - servers, storage and networking. It's a huge opportunity for HP because many of our competitors provide one of those. 

But, when it comes down to what the customers actually need, they need to integrate their servers with their networking and storage. So it's been a strong differentiator for HP as we are already pre-integrating our infrastructure. It's also a strength in our cloud strategy because underneath the cloud lies storage, servers and networking.