The prime focus of the 'HP Software Universe-Asia Pacific
2007' event held in Brisbane, Australia, from March 5-9, 2007 was to 'optimize
the business outcome of IT'. Following the alliance between HP and Mercury to
become HP Software, the five-day initiative was eventful with more than 90
sessions and networking opportunities for hundreds of participants from across
the world. Interestingly, this is the first time that the HP Software Forum and
Mercury World came together in a bid to offer measurable results when a customer
aligns IT with his/her business.
Thomas E Hogan, senior vice president, HP Software (technology
solutions group), in his keynote address, "IT means business for all.
80-90% of all business functionality has been touched or enabled by technology.
IT has already re-engineered the world and the present opportunity is to
re-engineer itself with significant and growing investment of capital and
expense."
"Some 65% of IT budgets are spent on operations, 25%
earmarked for migrations and upgrades, only 10% is being spent on new services
and innovations. Since 65% of IT budgets are earmarked for operations, CIOs face
fresh challenges in the new business world. The main challenges of the CIOs
include increased complexity, no patience for long-term transformation, while
demands outstrip available resources," Hogan added.
According to Hogan, who tried to focus on how to bring out
measurable results when using IT in businesses, 50% of IT projects fall short of
cost/benefit/value projections and operational spending is 3x of system costs.
"With 1,000 to 10,000 change requests coming in a week, we are not
surprised to see that 80% of all incidents are self-inflicted. In this
circumstance, our mandate will be: efficiency, innovation, risk management,
speed and agility. The HP strategy, applications and operations would bridge the
gaps between functional IT silos to deliver positive business outcomes," he
added.
Business intelligence (BI) is a top priority for CIOs and it has
become a hot subject for businesses as they attempt to extract more information
out of existing systems. The HP NeoView platform is addressing BI and data
warehouse issues. The focus would be on availability, industry standard
components, scalability and value. BI is one of the main businesses HP is
entering in a big way with an integrated hardware and software platform. The
NeoView platform is available today but HP will do a public launch shortly.
"We will provide the most scalable offering in the industry as we are not
the first to market data warehouse solutions," Hogan said.
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Top 10 Cio Priorities |
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HP's vision for BI and data warehousing with NeoView is part
of its BI optimization (BIO) section of its software business, alongside
business technology optimization (BTO) resulting from the Mercury alliance, and
its OpenCall messaging and multimedia platform for telecom service providers.
In the telecom world, tremendous changes are forced by a number
of factors including technology, regulation, competition, infrastructure, user
experience, and, of course, wallet. Telecom companies have more demands. Easy
creation and operation of high volume real time application, real time
management of subscribers' location, identity, access rights, easy and
flexible creation and operation of multimedia services, end-to-end quality and
performance of mobile services are the main needs of customers.
The strategic focus of HP OpenCall service would offer rich
content and cost effective services. "We will focus on helping our
customers fulfill their objectives for deploying cost effective, flexible
infrastructure, better understand and manage customers, create revenue
generating multimedia services, develop flexible, innovative pricing solutions,
and enhance service quality and performance," says Steven Dietch, director,
Worldwide Marketing, HP OpenCall.
Thanks to its innovative strategies, HP is enjoying a leadership
position with its OpenCall services. It has 70% market share in SMS-enabling
platforms; 100 mn subscribers utilize OpenCall-based mobile prepaid wireless
solutions, 200 mn subscribers with 38 service providers in five continents
depend on the OpenCall mission-critical home location register and over 4,000
signaling protocol platforms have been deployed worldwide.
Speaking to media, Dietch said that one main tip for CTOs/CEOs
to become cost effective will be to consolidate. Consolidation will help in
bringing down operation cost. Though consolidation among operators may affect us
marginally, it will be a challenge for us and we are equipped to face it, he
added.
Service providers are facing the challenges of managing
ever-increasing numbers of subscribers to various services. Besides, they have
to operate in a multi-network and multi-vendor infrastructure where rapidly
deploying new services before competitors is crucial in gaining the competitive
time-tomarket advantage. "Consolidation will improve innovation and in the
current market scenario, everyone is talking about moving towards IP platform,
one of the innovative initiatives. Consolidation would reduce complexity as
well. Consolidation efforts of global companies have resulted into reduction in
size of suppliers, interfaces, etc and improved employee productivity.
Consolidation will drive the industry. In this context, our focus would be to
innovate and stay with our focussed services," Dietch added.
On the sidelines of the event, T Srinivasan, executive director,
Software Products, HP India, said: "Following the alliance with Mercury,
the thrust would be on strengthening partnerships in India. Though the Mercury
brand will not exist in the global software space, the integration with Mercury
has already assisted the business to flourish in a big way."
Awards of Excellence
HP has announced the winners of the 2007 HP Software Business Technology
Optimization (BTO) Award for the Asia Pacific and Japan region, and the global
HP Software OpenCall Award of Excellence.
"We will focus on |
"Following the alliance |
"IT has already |
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-Steven Dietch, director, Worldwide Marketing, HP OpenCall |
-T Srinivasan, executive director, Software Products, HP India |
-Thomas E Hogan, senior vice president, HP Software (technology solutions group) |
The winners for the HP Software BTO awards include: KTF (for
excellence in delivering value to the business), Government of Western Australia
Department of Education and Training (excellence in capitalizing on change) and
Boral (excellence in achieving business continuity), while the winners for the
HP Software OpenCall Award of Excellence are Maxis (excellence in
consolidation), KTF (excellence in innovation) and KT (excellence in
convergence).
Winners were selected by an independent panel of judges who
evaluated entries based on the achievement of outstanding business results and
measurable IT improvements. The HP Software BTO awards recognize enterprises
using HP software to optimize the business outcomes of IT. The HP Software
OpenCall Award of Excellence honors telecommunications companies worldwide who
are using HP OpenCall solutions to deliver revenue generating service provider
solutions at the best value.
Baburajan K
baburajank@cybermedia.co.in
The author was hosted in Brisbane