'We are bullish on India and China'

Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) is one of the biggest geographical regions for all IT vendors. And Asian markets like China and India are considered as two biggest opportunity hot spots in that. Clearly, enterprise CIOs today are challenged by the technology deluge and look at ways and means to navigate through the trends like cloud computing to Big Data and much more. In order to address the multi-pronged challenges CIOs in the region face, vendors need to align their strategies that bring more business value and IT value as well. Scott Cassin, Chief Technologist and Strategist for Enterprise Services,HP Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) discusses with DATAQUEST on the key trends and its impact on the CIOs and HP's deliverables and differentiators.

How do you see APJ as a region in terms of IT challenges and opportunities?

If we look at markets like Australia, these are mature markets and hence the mandate relates to more maintenance and adoption of newer technologies. But the biggest happening regions are India and China which still has huge demand for IT infrastructure, solutions to advanced IT services. Some of the challenges CIOs face are akin to other regions as well. They range from- How IT can bring more value to business? How to use technology as an enabler to differentiate in the marketplace and perform better than competition? How to bring in business agility by adopting cloud? How to create secured cloud environment? How to leverage big data? - These are possible be the top of the mind issues for CIOs in this region.

If you look at IT spending patterns in the region- mainly in markets like China and India- how keen are CIOs looking at adopting these newer technologies?

Well, IT is not seen as an incremental spend- it is seen as means to achieve incremental strength. Managing the IT spending patterns for both vendors and for the enterprises indeed a challenge. Take the case of virtualization and the value it ushers in - 100 physical servers can be rationalised to a few. I believe the old world model of capital intensive IT purchase is a passé. Today many organizations have a baseline IT infrastructure and hence it is more about how to build it with new technologies and derive value out of it.

So how is HP approaching market?

The key here is offering solutions for a hybrid IT environment and provide one integrated universe that offer scalability, agility and business benefits. Our model is well attuned to the hybrid delivery that factor in the unique challenges CIOs face. And our service orchestration is more oriented towards proving an optimal IT infrastructure through a blended services model.

Would cloud cannibalize ‘on premise?

 

Well there are two ways are looking at. Newer enterprises and start-ups will be completely on the cloud. While larger and other enterprise which had accrued a whole lot of IT assets will look at going to private cloud very seriously. While in a private cloud the emphasis is not on cost savings rather manageability and agility. While smaller enterprise will accrue defined cost benefits.

It's an extremely competitive market- how do you differentiate HPs value?

We have two solid differentiators. Our ability to address hybrid IT environments- multi-vendors, multiple architectures and in line with that we offer a hybrid delivery model. Secondly, the hybrid model facilitates clear business outcomes for the clients and offer significant IT value and greater RoI.

Your top priorities for 2013...

Innovation. We are just going beyond the clichéd version of innovation. We are translating it on the ground and looking at working and finding ways and means of delivering innovation in many forms- products, services' delivery models et al. We are indeed taking innovation to granular levels and that impacts the clients and offer greater value.