HP’s Instant-On Enterprise, very much has to do with how if an organisation isn’t able to address customers instantly, or give them the information, collaboration and input, then that organisation would have lost competitive advantage and is not likely to be successful. For HP, the Instant-On Enterprise exists in a world of continuous connectivity that require products, services and information faster and more reliably than ever before. And according to HP, cloud computing is a core tenet of this always connected and immediately connected strategy.
HP Asia Pacific and Japan’s Enterprise Services chief technology officer, Bradden Wondra says, “ So we see that the convenience of cloud and connectivity and mobility is really changing the IT landscape right now; information is living on the cloud or living on the network and more and more consumers, enterprises and governments are accessing that data from mobile devices, wherever and whenever they need to.”
He rationalises that this sort of instantaneity was the key reason that cloud computing is moving so quickly in terms of adoption. For example, research shows that senior execs in APAC believe that 19-percent of their IT delivery would be through public cloud, with 26-percent via the private cloud. Wondra says, “It doesn’t mean traditional sorts of data centres or hosting environments are simply going away. We see it is more of an evolution or complementary situation, where eventually we believe the winner is going to be the hybrid model.”
With private cloud playing an important role in HP’s and their clients’ cloud strategy, they aren’t overlooking the role that traditional types of hosting and outsourced arrangements will still play.
“This highlights the importance of hybrid clouds and the importance of having tools, processes and methodologies that allow you to manage your IT environment across those different types of landscapes,” Wondra points out.
HP Enterprise Services: a legacy of managed and outsourcing services
Wondra highlights how three key things are happening for HP Enterprise Services. “We are very focused on the suite of cloud services right now, namely Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service, Software-as-a-Service and Business process-as-a-Service.”
He adds that HP Enterprise Services is also very focused on their own transformation. Having been acquired as EDS nearly three years ago, the monolith is now very focused on taking data centres and its operations into a modern manufacturing model – fully-automated, lights-out with no people necessary to operate and keep it running.
Wondra also says, “We are focused on our applications business. We are the largest software testing company in the world and top three in terms of software development in the world. We have a significant practice with SAP, Microsoft, Oracle in terms of our capabilities in building, coding, deploying and operating those software platforms for our partners. So we are creating industry alignment.”
Business process-as-a-Service
Software alignment isn’t all that HP’s Enterprise Services is creating. “Think about if you as a bank or airline, could access a whole process for your business, over the network. For example if we can run loan applications or mortgage applications for a bank, in a browser?”
The compelling argument for this is that businesses do not need to build the process or the software or the infrastructure to process all that, but only instruct solution providers like HP, things like, “We need to collect these data about our customers, we need these data to be in these different places and we want to come back and do these different things once this process is completed. In effect, that’s where we see this outsourcing business going.”
Wondra provokes with, “Is running a server, something that helps banks win more customers and business?”
Enterprises want to buy a result like more passengers on their airplanes, and only need to buy technology solutions which have become industry commodities in these situations.
“If you can commodotise that infrastructure layer, then you can commodotise that platform layer and also that software layer, because we are all using Oracle or SAP and so on, every time you move up a level, you forget about what’s below. Why do you really want to think about SAP or Oracle? Don’t you really want to think about a particular application, a passenger boarding system, a loan approval system, a digital hospital? You want to think about a solution that drives a particular outcome for your industry. You don’t really want to worry about all the things that are happening at all those layers below.”
HP even has two Business process-as-a-Service offerings, up and running at time of writing. One is for American Airlines. “We now run everything for them. And they pay us every time a passenger sits in a seat. Until a passenger sits in a seat, we don’t get paid. We need to run all of this ( whole stack) very efficiently, and we need to make sure that everything from the reservation system to the revenue management systems, all their systems run well, so that we can help them get more passengers in the seat. If the IT provider helps the business succeed, that’s when it’s making a difference.”
HP also runs a credit card utility in Asia Pacific, which caters to new banks without their own credit card facilities.
Wondra explains, “We can give you all of the IT systems that make you able to offer credit card services. All you need is a brand, some marketing, you configure all our IT systems in a multi-tenant kind of cloud-like way, and suddenly you have a customer relationship system, billing system, invoicing systems, card, statement printing system… we have all of that for you.
“You don’t have to do all the business processes associated with credit cards. You now can focus on the differentiating things; features and benefits of your card, your brand… that’s where you add value.”
Cloud Services Automation and Blade System Matrix
By Anthony McMahon, HP APAC and Japan, vice president of Software and Solutions
Cloud Services Automation (CSA) provides a series of software and framework for customers to deliver and provide cloud services without having to upgrade their infrastructure. Now if they want to start from scratch or build a cloud-ready stack, they can take our Blade System Matrix (BSM), and our CSA together, to stand up a private cloud in less than 30 days.
So, we’ve done that as bundle today, but if they have other infrastructure investments from HP or other companies, they can start automating and go to cloud services with our CSA solution as part of their roadmap to go to cloud.
How? There are four CSA components or layers from the customer’s perspective.
There needs to be a single portal that allows customers to both demand and consume whatever that cloud service may be. And that can be defined; it’s somewhere a user or IT person goes to facilitate the consumption and delivery of that service.
Second part is being able to deploy intelligently applications based on those services or user requirements. So you need to have an intelligent application deployment layer.
That will trigger a need to manage and monitor the various configurations – infrastructure, the operating system, the middleware, the application – how do I manage that to know that in a virtual or physical way, where those applications are running and how they’ve been configured, because if I need to move those around later, I need to keep that information dynamic.
The final piece is I need to be able to send signals to either the hardware and infrastructure from HP or other companies, on what resources I need to pull together across network, storage, server and computer.
What CSA provides is a software and framework to do those things in those four layers: portal, application deployment, configuration management and resource management.
Aman Neil Dokania, HP APAC and Japan, Converged Infrastructure Solution Sales’ vice president and general manager
Blade systems integrates storage and server and in one enclosure and we have done is take our blade systems and integrated a virtual fabric; a flex fabric; which virtualises the network so you don’t have to change the store-in network connectivity when you move a server or a virtual machine from one enclosure to another enclosure, one rack to another rack or from one data centre to another data centre.
Our virtualisation layer comes with a choice of Microsoft’s or VMware’s hypervisor and that comes with the BSM. We also have a matrix operating environment which basically gives you an orchestration and management layer which allows you to automatically provision resources, it allows you to design service templates and also it has a service portal where you can publish all the services that you design for cloud.
A user can go to the portal to select and launch a service; there’s a resource manager which is part of that environment and it will allocate the pool of virtual resources and provision the service and meter the service.
All that is part of the single, integrated environment that is Blade System Matrix.
The way to look to look at it is BSM together with CSA helps you to deploy private cloud; it’s a fast track to private cloud because it comes with a service portal, the catalogue – we also have published templates that we call cloud maps, for SAP apps, or Oracle’s or Microsoft’s or other independent software vendors, so you can quickly provision this applications as a service, using these cloud maps.
HP and the connected world
Last March, HP’s new chief Leo Apotheker had outlined a strategy on how to provide seamless, secure, context-aware experiences for the connected world. Highlights of his speech include:
– HP intends to leverage its position as a leading provider of cloud technology to develop a portfolio of cloud services from infrastructure to platform services. This includes plans to develop and run the industry’s first open cloud marketplace that will combine a secure, scalable and trusted consumer app store and an enterprise application and services catalog.
– HP intends to build webOS into a leading connectivity platform. As the world’s no.1 maker of PCs and printers, HP has the potential to deliver 100 million webOS-enabled devices a year into the marketplace, and HP plans to use that scale along with leading development tools to build robust developer community. This is something that HP will launch across geographies and in multiple languages.
– HP demonstrated a new ‘big data’ appliance leveraging the unmatched performance of HP computing power materd with real-time, high-speed analytics from Vertica Systems which HP announced it would acquire. The proposed HP Vertica solution will offer a choice of delivery options – from appliance to software and in the cloud.
The journey towards cloud
By Mohan Krishnan, HP APAC and Japan, Technology Consulting, Technology Services, vice president and managing partner
From the services side, we have consultants who will do cloud discovery workshop, cloud design services, roadmap services, maturity models – where the customer wants to go and how they will get there – that is what my team actually does, consulting and implementations around next-generation data centres.
You first start with server and storage consolidation, and it may take a three year journey to become a fully cloud-enabled data centre. Challenges are typically one application users one server and one storage unit. When you start consolidating, sharing happens so two or three apps start to share one server and maybe one storage device.
Then, you’d need to have some level of management or control for example disaster recovery, security, access and so on, start to become more important.
One HP customer based in Australia, has a nine-month planning phase and 18-months of implementation. At end of two and half years, they will be 80-percent cloud ready.
