Hewlett-Packard officials say they want to help enterprises shift more of their IT spending away from operations and toward innovation.
HP is rolling out a number of products and services designed to enable businesses to reduce the operating costs in their data centers-through best practices and technology-so that more money is freed up for projects designed to move the company forward.
HP officials announced the offerings May 11, the same day they unveiled the results of a survey in which 70 percent of respondents said they were unable to invest in new technology that would help them meet business needs. In addition, respondents said 70 percent of their budgets were spent on mission-critical and legacy systems, leaving 30 percent for new technology projects.
The results echoed what other IT vendors have found. At the EMC World show in Boston May 10, EMC CEO Joe Tucci said 72 percent of IT budgets are spent on maintenance of existing technologies, with only 28 percent being spent on innovation.
“This is a problem as we go into the future,” Tucci said in his keynote address, adding that his company is looking to help enterprises reverse the ratio.
HP wants to help businesses make the same sort of change, according to Lynn Anderson, vice president of marketing for HP’s Enterprise Business unit. One way is to help enterprises create self-funding projects that enable them to innovate despite current tight budgetary constraints and to see a quick payback on the investment.
To this end, HP is offering customers a complimentary Applications Modernization Transformation Experience session. The idea is to let businesses see the benefits of modernization by getting ride of code that’s no longer used, redesigning around such technologies as Java and .NET, and replacing and decommissioning older, legacy systems, Anderson said.
HP also is offering new Modernization Funding Options, giving customers access to money to help with the turnaround.
In addition, the vendor has made enhancements to its HP Insight Control server management software. Among the improvements is iLO 3 (Integrated Lights-Out Advanced), which is designed to reduce management costs by making it easier for IT administrators to set up servers, optimize power and cooling, and take advantage of embedded server health monitoring, according to Anderson.
“It addresses a lot of operational concerns,” she said.
HP also is adding two new servers to its ProLiant lineup, both of which offer a 20:1 consolidation ratio, which Anderson said will improve efficiency in the data center while improving performance. The DL360 G7 and DL380 G7 offer a 27-times improvement in performance per watt and a two-month ROI, she said.
The vendor’s Cloud Service Automation is designed to make it easier for businesses to move into the cloud computing realm, with both private and public clouds. The offering will help automate such tasks as deploying applications into the cloud, provisioning of capacity, and monitoring and managing of the cloud resources.
“It allows you to see into the cloud,” Anderson said.
To further help free up money trapped in operations, HP has expanded its Mission Critical Services by enabling support for multivendor x86 environments, and offers the same level of support for both physical and virtualized infrastructures, she said.
In addition, HP’s IT Service Management Assessment for Virtualized Environments-part of HP Proactive Services-is designed to increase efficiency of virtualized infrastructures through expert recommendations and priority improvements.
HP’s Financial Solution Analysis offering is designed to give enterprise CIOs and chief financial officers a clear understanding of the costs and rewards of implementing IT solutions.
All of these come at a time when businesses are finding that they’re losing time by not being able to free up money being used for operational costs. According to the survey, 95 percent of respondents said such “innovation gridlock” has led to lost opportunities, and 99 percent said it cost them time.