The original Valley startup is once again pulling itself up by the bootstraps and gearing up for a new style of IT defined by cloud, mobility, social and big data
By Sanjay Gupta
It is old wisdom that when in Rome, do as the Romans do. Or at least say hello in the local language.
That’s exactly what Meg Whitman, HP’s charismatic CEO, did in her keynote in Beijing recently. And given the size of the China market (and probably HP’s targets for emerging markets like China), she followed her Chinese greeting with a lot of praise for the country: how HP became one of the first JVs in high-tech way back in 1985, the significance of starting the World Tour events right there, etc., etc.
Squarely putting customers at the center of what HP does, Whitman emphasized the relevance of her company to enterprise and end customers. “You need HP to continue to bring you solutions to succeed in the market,” she said.
While that is true to some extent, the bigger reality may be the other way round: HP perhaps needs new customers to sign up as well as old loyalists to stick around more than at any other time in its long, storied history.
HP, the original garage-style startup of Silicon Valley that went on to become one of the world’s largest, most respected and diverse IT vendors, has been having checkered success and struggling to maintain its dominance in the world of technology for the past few years.
Among the challenges the company has faced: constant changes at the top (Whitman was the fourth CEO in less than three years when she joined), confusion about how to run the PCs/printers business (still big in numbers but long commoditized), messy/expensive acquisitions such as Compaq’s and, more recently, Autonomy’s, missing the tablet/mobile boom, and many more.
High time the company came out with an all-round strategy to counter the situation and silence the critics—as well as reassure the customers.
The World Tour event in Beijing was part of a series HP has rolled out, basically, to connect with key customers in different regions and broadcast the message: HP is here to stay. And, of course, to make loud and clear noises about being on a course where everyone is moving—to cloud, to big data, to mobility, to social media, the works.
Like Whitman said, every 10 to 15 years big changes happen in the world of computing. “We are at the next inflection point of cloud,” she noted.
She also referred to the “new way of IT” which is driven, besides cloud, by more data, more speed, more consumerization…or call it more expectations from the vendors.
The new HP
The problems with HP could also be its strengths, if it can play its deck well. One can either look at the huge portfolio in bewilderment or say, “Wow, you’ve got it all.”
With Whitman at the helm and COO Bill Veghte and other lieutenants at her side, HP seems to have realized that it must leverage its past successes, invest in new technologies and make a concerted go at the market opportunities. Trying to keep its old DNA of innovation and people-friendliness intact, the company is projecting a new HP that’s more palatable not just to investors and analysts but, more importantly, to the new, more-demanding customer.
Which is why Whitman said in her address: “We helped build the previous world, and we will help build the new one. We have a great track record of success and HP is here to stay.”
That, of course, would be easier said than done, especially with nifty cloud and device rivals nipping at its heels and shifty customers changing handsets (and sometimes vendors) at the first touch of discomfort.
No wonder Veghte maintains a punishing global travel schedule to meet up with customers and partners (before his keynote, he pointed to the bags around his eyes as proof).
Reinforcing Whitman’s spiel on the new way of IT, Veghte said, “HP is not just about hardware and software; it’s about 300,000 committed employees around the world.” Giving a sweeping view of HP’s products, he added, “We are innovating aggressively to make the user experience simpler, faster and secure.”
In the enterprise space, HP has of late been talking a lot about its converged infrastructure offerings—for building a common, modern IT architecture that “pools resources across servers, storage and networking.” At Beijing, HP announced new additions to its Converged Cloud portfolio, which is touted to deliver improved agility, greater innovation and lower cost of hybrid cloud environments.
The new announcement includes HP Cloud OS, which is based on OpenStack (an open source software for building private and public clouds). While there are other foundations to build clouds, HP and a growing roster of companies are placing their bets on OpenStack.
The pitch about converged products, however, is not entirely new and other vendors are also offering similar, common-architecture products. The differentiation, claims Whitman, is that “no other company can execute like HP can.”
One of the key constituents of HP’s success in the cloud world will be how its 80-plus CloudAgile partners are able to convince their customers to build the various flavors of cloud with HP ingredients.
For its part, HP also has a team of consultants and is organizing what it calls “Transformation Experience Workshops” for enterprises. Through them, the company aims to understand the big pain points or transformational needs of existing as well as prospective customers—and then suggest a solution or a custom package of solutions from its portfolio.
According to Balaji SV, Regional Director (APAC & Japan) of Storage Services under HP’s Technology Consulting division, the conversion rate of such workshops is as high as 70-80%.
A long shot
Another innovation that HP thinks can catapult it to starry heights in cloud computing, especially for the new data centers currently being built all over the world, is a product called Moonshot. In Veghte’s words, it offers “the fastest time-to-value to build a private cloud.”
Brandishing what looked like a thin circuit board the size of a folded newspaper before the audience at Beijing, he proudly exclaimed, “This is going to be big because it is small.”
HP claims that Moonshot is the world’s first software-defined web server and, compared to traditional servers, consumes 80% less space and 89% less energy—at a cost that is 77% lower. It is also supposed to be incredibly simple.
In a quote posted on HP’s website, Whitman gushes about the product, “HP Moonshot marks the beginning of a new style of IT that will change the infrastructure economics and lay the foundation for the next 20 billion devices [that will be connected to the Internet].”
That’s a long shot among the series of salvos HP has fired. How well are these received and returned by enterprises will be seen pretty soon. The computing ball is on an interesting roll once again.
