Tag-Team of HP Workshops Provides Essential Path to IT Maturity Assessment and a Data Center Transformation Journey

Transcript of a sponsored podcast discussion on two HP workshops that help businesses determine actual IT needs and provide a roadmap for improving data center operations and efficiency.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Learn more. Sponsor: HP.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to BriefingsDirect.

Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion on some fast-moving trends by addressing the need for data center transformation (DCT). We'll also identify some proven ways that explore how to do DCT effectively.

The pace of change, degrees of complexity, and explosion around the uses of new devices and increased data sources are placing new requirements and new strain on older data centers. Research shows that a majority of enterprises are either planning for or are in the midst of data center improvements and expansions.

Deciding how to best improve your data center however is not an easy equation. Those building new data centers need to contend with architectural shifts to cloud and hybrid infrastructure models, as well as the need to cut total cost and reduce energy consumption for the long-term.

An added requirement for new data centers is to satisfy the needs of both short-and long-term goals, by effectively jibing the need for agility now with facility decisions that may well impact the company for 20 years or more.

We are going to examine two ongoing HP workshops as a means for better understanding DCT and for accurately assessing a company’s maturity in order to know how to begin a DCT journey and where it should end up.

We're here with rather three HP experts on the Data Center Transformation Experience Workshop and the Converged Infrastructure Maturity Model Workshop. Please join me now in welcoming Helen Tang, Solutions Lead for Data Center Transformation and Converged Infrastructure Solution for HP Enterprise Business. Welcome, Helen.

Helen Tang: Thanks, Dana.

Gardner: We're also here with Mark Edelmann, Senior Program Manager at HP’s Enterprise Storage, Servers, and Network Business Unit. Welcome, Mark.

Mark Edelmann: Thank you, Dana. Good to be here.

Gardner: And also Mark Grindle, Business Consultant for Data Center Infrastructure Services and Technology Services in HP Enterprise Business. Welcome, Mark.

Mark Grindle: Hi, Dana. Thanks a lot.

Gardner: Helen, as I mentioned, this is a very difficult situation for organizations. Lots of conflicting data is coming in, and many changes, many different trends are impacting this. Why don’t we try to set the stage a little bit for why DCT is so important, but also why it's no easy task.

Exciting times

Tang: Absolutely, Dana. As you said, there are a lot of difficulties for technology, but also if you look at the big picture, we live in extremely exciting times. We have rapidly changing and evolving business models, new technology advances like cloud, and a rapidly changing workforce.

What the world is demanding is essentially instant gratification. You can call it sort of an instant-on world, a world where everything is mobile, everybody is connected, interactive, and things just move very immediately and fluidly. All your customers and constituents want their need satisfied today, in an instant, as opposed to days or weeks. So, it takes a special kind of enterprise to do just that and compete in this world.

You need to be able to serve all of these customers, employees, partners, and citizens -- 0r if you happen to be a government organization -- with whatever they want or need instantly, any point, any time, through any channel. This is what HP is calling the Instant-On Enterprise, and we think it's the new imperative.

Gardner: When you say instant-on, it means that companies have to respond to their customers at almost lightning speed, but we are talking about infrastructures that can take years to build out. How do you jibe the two, the need to be instant, in terms of how you respond, but recognizing that this is a very difficult, complex, and timely process?

Tang: Therein lies the challenge. Your organization is demanding ever more from IT -- more innovation, faster time to market, more services -- but at the same time, you're being constrained by older architectures, inflexible siloed infrastructure that you may have inherited over the years. How do you deliver this new level of agility and be able to meet those needs?

You have to take a transformational approach and look at things like converged infrastructure as a foundation for moving your current data center to a future state that’s able to support all of this growth, with virtualized resource pools, integrated automated processes across the data center, with an energy-efficient future-proofed physical data center design, that’s able to flex and meet these needs.

Gardner: Of course, one of the larger trends too is that technology is just more important to more companies in more ways. This is not something you do just to support your employees. It really is core to most companies in how they actually conduct business, and is probably one of the chief determinants of their success.

So doing DCT is really part and parcel with how well you actually run your business -- or am I overstating it?

Tang: That’s absolutely true. We talked earlier about how being an Instant-On Enterprise is an imperative. Why do we call it that? Well, because these vast changes are coming, and you don’t have a choice.

If you look at just a few examples of some of these changes in the world of IT, number one is devices. I think you mentioned this earlier. There’s an explosion of devices being used: smartphones, laptops, TouchPads, PDAs. According to the Gartner Group, by 2014, that’s less than three years, 90 percent of organizations will need to support their corporate applications on personal devices. Is IT ready for that? Not by a long shot today.

Architecture shifts

Another trend that we see is some of these architecture shifts. Cloud obviously is very hot today, but two or three years ago a lot of CIOs pooh-poohed the idea and said, "Oh, that’s not real. That’s just hype." Well, the trend is really upon us.

Another Gartner stat: in the next four years, 43 percent of CIOs will have the majority of their IT infrastructure and organizations and apps running in the cloud or in some sort of software-as-a-service (SaaS) technology. Most organizations aren’t equipped to deal with that.

Last but not least, look at your workforce. In less than 10 years about half of the workforce will be millennials, which is defined as people born between the year of 1981 and 2000 -- the first generation to come of age in the new millennium. This is a Forrester statistic.

This younger generation grew up with the Internet. They work and communicate very differently from the workforce of today and they will be a main constituency for IT in less than 10 years. That’s going to force all of us to adjust to different types of support expectations, different user experiences, and governance.

Maturity is a psychological term used to indicate how a person responds to the circumstances or environment in an appropriate and adaptive manner.

Gardner: So, as we recognize that the workloads, the requirements placed on IT are shifting, the data center needs to respond to that as well. I guess it’s important to know where you are, how well you have done in adjusting to what you have been serving up in the last several years in order to know what you need to do in order to be able to provide for these new requirements that we are describing.

Let’s start talking about one of these first workshops. It’s about the Maturity Model, a better understanding of where you are. I guess there is an order to these workshops. This one seems to be in the right order. You have to know where you are before you can decide where to go.

So let’s move to Mark Edelmann. Tell me a little bit about the Converged Infrastructure Maturity Model and why it’s important, as I said, to know where you are before you start charting the course in any detail to the future.

Edelmann: Before we dive into the maturity model though, I recently bumped into a definition on Wikipedia about maturity and I thought it might be useful to consider your IT environment as you listen to this definition that I picked up.

"Maturity is a psychological term used to indicate how a person responds to the circumstances or environment in an appropriate and adaptive manner. The response is generally learned rather than instinctive and is not determined by one’s age. Maturity also encompasses being aware of the correct time and place to behave and knowing when to act appropriately according to the situation."

Now, that probably sounds a little bit like what you might want your infrastructure to behave like and to actually achieve a level of maturity, and that’s exactly what the Maturity Model Workshop is all about.

Overall assessment

The Maturity Model consists of an overall assessment, and it’s a very objective assessment. It’s based on roughly 60 questions that we go through to specifically address the various dimensions, or as we call them domains, of the maturity of an IT infrastructure.

We apply these questions in a consultative, interactive way with our customers, because some of the discussions can get very, very detailed. Asking these questions of many of our customers that have participated in these workshops has been a new experience. We're going to ask our customers things that they probably never thought about before or have only thought of in a very brief sort of a way, but it’s important to get to the bottom of some of these issues.

As a result of examining the infrastructure’s maturity along these lines, we're able to establish a baseline of the maturity of the infrastructure today. And, in the course of interviewing and discussing this with our customers, we also identify where they would like to be in terms of their maturity in the future. From that, we can put together a plan of how to get from here to there.

Gardner: When you say a workshop, are these set up so that people physically go there and you have them in different places, or is there a virtual version where people can participate regardless of where they are? How does that work?

Edelmann: We've found it’s much more valuable to sit down face to face with the customer and go through this, and it actually requires an investment of time. There’s a lot of background information that has to be gathered and so forth, and it seems best if we're face to face as we go through this and have the discussion that’s necessary to really tease out all the details.

The impact of mergers and acquisitions has kind of forced some customers to put together different technologies, different platforms, using different vendors.

Gardner: I'd like to understand a little bit more, Mark, why you break out maturity versus installed base. Help me understand what it takes in order to succeed and what you typically find with these companies? Do they find that they are further ahead than they thought or further behind when we look at this through that distinct lens of maturity?

Edelmann: Most of our customers find out that they are a lot further behind than they thought they were. It's not necessarily due to any fault on their part, but possibly a result of aging infrastructure, because of the economic situation we have been in, disparate siloed infrastructure as a result of building out application focused stacks, which was kind of the way we approached IT historically.

Also, the impact of mergers and acquisitions has kind of forced some customers to put together different technologies, different platforms, using different vendors and so forth. Rationalizing all that can leave them in kind of a disparate sort of a state. So, they usually find that they are a lot further behind than they thought.

Gardner: And, because you've been doing this for quite some time and you've been doing it around the world, you have a pretty good set of data. You have some good historical trend lines to examine, so you have certain domains and certain stages of maturity that you have been able to identify.

Maybe you could help us understand what those are and then relate how folks can then place themselves on those lines, not only to know where they are, but have a sense of how far it is they need to go to get to that higher level of maturity they're seeking.

Edelmann: Sure. We can talk through that level of detail and you can familiarize yourself, at least verbally, with how this model is set up and so forth.

4x5 matrix

Picture, if you will, a 4x5 matrix. We examine the customer’s infrastructure in four, what we call, domains. These domains consist of technology and architecture, management tools and processes, the culture and IT staff, and the demand, supply, and IT governance aspects of the infrastructure and the data center operations. Those are the four domains in which we ask these questions and make our assessment.

From that, as we go through this, through some very detailed analysis that we have done over the years, we're able to position the customer’s infrastructure in one of five stages:

• The first stage, which is where most people start, is in Stage 1; we call that Compartmentalized and Legacy, which is rather essentially the least-mature stage.
• From there we move to Stage 2, which we call Standardized.
• Stage 3 then is Optimized.
• Stage 4 gets us into Automated and a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), and,
  
• Stage 5 is more or less IT utopia necessary to become the Instant-On Enterprise that Helen just talked about. We called that Adaptively Sourced Infrastructure.

We evaluate each domain under several conditions against those five stages and we essentially wind up with a baseline of where the customer stands.

We've been doing this for a while and we've done a lot of examinations across the world and across various industries. We have a database of roughly 1,400 customers that we then compare the customer’s maturity to. So, the customer can determine where they stand with regards to the overall norms of IT infrastructures.

It's a difficult and a long journey to get to that level, but there are ways to get there, and that’s what we're here for.

We can also illustrate to the customer what the best-in-class behavior is, because right now, there aren’t a whole lot of infrastructures that are up at Stage 5. It's a difficult and a long journey to get to that level, but there are ways to get there, and that’s what we're here for.

Gardner: I want to make sure I've got this straight in terms of the order of these workshops and why how they play off of one another. Maybe, Helen, you could come back in and help understand which one you see people doing first and which one you think is the one that makes the more sense?

Tang: Both workshops are great. It's not really an either/or. I would start with the Data Center Transformation Experience Workshop, because that sets the scene in the background of how I start to approach this problem. What do I think about? What are the key areas of consideration? And, it maps out a strategy on a grander scale.

The CI Maturity Model Assessment specifically gets into when you think about implementation. Let's dive in and really drill deep into your current state versus future state when it comes to these five domains that Mark just described.

Gardner: Let's go now to the Data Center Transformation Experience Workshop with Mark Grindle. First, do you share Helen’s perspective on the order, and what would people gain by entering into the Data Center Transformation Experience Workshop first? Then, you can then fill us in a little bit on what it's about?

Interesting workshop

Grindle: Thanks, Dana. I agree with what Helen said. It really is more structured if you do the Data Center Transformation Experience Workshop first and then follow that up with the Maturity Model. It's very interesting workshop, because it's very different from any other workshop, at least that I have ever participated in. It's not theoretical and it's also extremely interactive.

It was originally designed and set up based on HP IT’s internal transformation. So, it's based on exactly what we went through to accomplish all the great things that we did, and we've continued to refine and improve it based on our customer experiences too. So, it's a great representation of our internal experiences as well as what customers and other businesses and other industries are going through.

During the process, we walk the customer through everything that we've learned, a lot of best practices, a lot of our experiences, and it's extremely interactive.

Then, as we go through each one of our dimensions, or each one of the panels, we probe with the customer to discuss what resonates well with them, where they think they are in certain areas, and it's a very interactive dialog of what we've learned and know and what they've learned and know and what they want to achieve.

The outcome is typically a very robust document and conversation around how the customer should proceed with their own transformation, how they should sequence it, what their priorities are, and true deliverables -- here are the tasks you need to take on and accomplish -- either with our help or on their own.

It’s a great way of developing a roadmap, a strategy, and an initial plan on how to go forward with their own transformational efforts.

It’s a great way of developing a roadmap, a strategy, and an initial plan on how to go forward with their own transformational efforts.

Gardner: And the same question to you, Mark Grindle, about location. Is this something you prefer to do face to face as Mark Edelmann mentioned, or is this something that people can gather virtually or through road shows? How does it actually come to the market?

Grindle: It absolutely has to be face-to-face. We use a very large conference room and we set up these panels around the room. Each one of these panels is floor to ceiling and height. There are about 4 feet by 5, or 5.5 feet high, and we walk through a series of 10 panels that approaches each of the dimensions of transformation, as we look at it.

So having all the people in the room and being able to be interactive face to face, as well as reference panels that you might have gone through or that you are about to go through as different points in the conversation come up, is critical to having a successful workshop.

Designed around strategy

It's definitely designed around strategy. Most people, when they look at transformation, think about their data centers, their servers, and somewhat their storage, but really the goal of our workshop is to help them understand, in a much more holistic view, that it's not just about that typical infrastructure. It has to do with program management, governance, the dramatic organizational change that goes on if you go through transformation.

Applications, the data, the business outcomes, all of this has to be tied in to to ensure that, at end of the day, you've implemented a very cost-effective solution that meets the needs of the businesses. That really is a game-changing type of move by your organization.

Gardner: And, as part of some of the trends we mentioned, building these for the long-term means that you're building for operational efficiency. The total cost, of course, over time is going to be that ongoing operational penalty or, if you do it right, perhaps payback. How do you help people appreciate the economics of the data center, and how important is that to people in these workshops?

Grindle: The financials are absolutely critical. There are very few businesses today that aren’t extremely focused on their bottom line and how they can reduce the operational cost.

Certainly, from the HP IT experience, we can show, although it's not a trivial investment to make this all happen, the returns are not only normally a lot larger than your investment, but they are year-over-year savings. That’s money that typically can be redeployed to areas that really impact the business, whether it's through manufacturing, marketing, or sales. This is money that can be reinvested in the business, and allowed to help grow the areas that really will have future impact on the growth of the business, while reducing the cost of your data centers and your operation.

Even though you're driving down the cost of your IT organization, you're not giving up quality and you are not giving up technology.

Interestingly enough, what we find is that, even though you're driving down the cost of your IT organization, you're not giving up quality and you are not giving up technology. You actually have to implement new technologies and robust technologies to help bring your cost down. Things like automations, operational efficiency, ITIL processes all help you drive the saving while you are allowed to upgrade your systems and your environments to current technologies and new technologies.

And, while we're on the topic of cost savings, a lot of times when we are talking to customer about transformation, it's normally being driven by some critical IT imperative, like they're out of space in their data center and they're about to look at building out a new data center or perhaps a obtaining a collocation site. A lot of times we find that we sit down and talk with them about how they can modernize their application, tier their storage, go with higher density equipment, virtualize their servers, they actually can free up space and avoid that major investment of the new data center.

Gardner: That gets back to the definition of maturity, where it might not necessarily mean bringing in trucks and pouring cement. It could very well mean transforming in a way that ekes out more productivity from your existing facilities before you rush into something new. Is that typically the case? How often does that really happen where you can wring out enough efficiency to postpone the actual new facility?

Grindle: It happens time and time again. I am working with a company right now that was looking at going to eight data centers and by implementing a lot of these new technologies -- higher virtualization rates, improvements to their applications, and better management of their data on their storage. We're trying to get them down into two data centers. So right there is a substantial change. And, that’s just an example of things that I have seen time and time again, as we've done these workshops.

A big part of this is working through what the customer really needs and what their business drivers really are. In some cases, we're finding out that brick and mortar aren’t really the right solutions for their data centers. They should look at collocation or even at more creative solutions like the HP Data Center POD, where you can stand up one of these containers filled with high density, very modern equipment, and meet all their needs without doing anything to your existing data center.

It's all about walking through the problems and the issues that are at hand and figuring out what the right answers are to meet their needs, while trying to control the expense.

What's next?

Gardner: Okay, I am starting to get it now. I see why these two workshops play off of one another, because you are laying out all the things that have happened at HP, what to expect, and what some of the alternatives are. That way you've got in your mind a set of alternative directions. Then, by doing the Maturity Model, you get a sense of where you are and where you can go, and putting the two together can start you on that path.

Let’s look at that future path a little bit. Folks have taken these workshops and gotten a better sense of the holistic full total equation. What usually happens next? What's the process from research, understanding, and knowledge to actually starting to hammer out a definition of what you and your particular situation as an organization should do?

Let me fire that first off at you, Helen.

Tang: As often happens, it depends. It’s based on your organization’s business needs. Where are you trying to go in the next year, two years, or five years? It’s also based on the level of constraint that you face right now in the data center.

We see one of two paths. In the more transformational approach, whereby you have the highest level of buy-in, all the way up to the CIO and sometimes CFO and CEO, you lay out an actual 12-18 month plan. HP can help with that, and you start executing towards that. You say, "Okay, what would be the first step?" A lot of times, it makes sense to standardize, consolidate. Then, what is the next step? Sometimes that’s modernizing applications, and so on. That’s one approach we have seen.

A lot of organizations don’t have the luxury of going top-down and doing the big bang transformation. Then, we take a more project-based approach. It still helps them a lot going through these two workshops. They get to see the big picture and all the things that are possible, but they start picking low-hanging fruit that would yield the highest ROI and solve their current pain points.

A lot of organizations don’t have the luxury of going top-down and doing the big bang transformation.

Often, in these past few years, it has been virtualization. What is my current virtualization level? How do I take it up to maximum efficiency? And then, look to adjacent projects. So, the next step might be consolidation, or automation, and so on.

Gardner: Mark Edelmann, same to you. Are there some typical scenarios that you've seen that folks when they have digested the implications from these workshops then have a vision or a direction, and what typically would that be?

Edelmann: Helen did a great job of outlining it, because different customers start at different places and they are headed for different places. Often, the journey is a little bit different from one customer to the other.

The Maturity Model Workshop you might think of as being at a little lower level than the Data Center Transformation Workshop. As a result of the Maturity Model Workshops, we produce a report for the customer to understand -- A is where I'm at, and B is where I'm headed. Those gaps that are identified during the course of the assessment help lead a customer to project definitions.

In some cases, there may be some obvious things that can be done in the short term and capture some of that low-hanging fruit -- perhaps just implement a blade system or something like that -- that will give them immediate results on the path to higher maturity in their transformation journey.

Multiple starting points

There are multiple starting points and consequently multiple exit points from the Maturity Model Workshop as well.

Gardner: Mark Grindle, same kind of question. How do people take what they've gathered here to use it? Any stories or anecdotes about what you have seen people do with this that has helped them?

Grindle: Mark and Helen were both right in their comments. The result of the workshop is really a sequence series of events that the customer should follow up on next. Those can be very specific items, like gather your physical server inventories so that that can be analyzed, to other items such as run a Maturity Model Workshop, so that you can understand where you are in each of the areas and what the gaps are, based on where you really want to be.

It’s always interesting when we do these workshops, because we pull together a group of senior executives covering all the domains that I've talked about -- program management, governance -- their infrastructure people, their technology people, their applications people, and their operational people, and it’s always funny, the different results we see.

I had one customer that said to me that the deliverable we gave them out in the workshop was almost anti-climatic versus what they learned in the workshop. What they had learned during this one was that many people had different views of where the organization was and where it wanted to go.

It’s a great learning collaborative event that brings together a lot of the thoughts on where they want to head.

Each was correct from their particular discipline, but from an overarching view of what are we trying to do for the business, they weren’t all together on all of that. It’s funny how we see those lights go on as people are talking and you get these interesting dialogs of people saying, "Well, this is how that is." And someone else going, "No, it’s not. It’s really like this."

It’s amazing the collaboration that goes on just among the customer representatives above and beyond the customer with HP. It’s a great learning collaborative event that brings together a lot of the thoughts on where they want to head. It ends up motivating people to start taking those next actions and figuring out how they can move their data centers and their IT environment in a much more logical, and in most cases, aggressive fashion than they were originally thinking.

Gardner: It sounds like a very powerful exercise for a lot of different reasons. For those folks interested, how could they learn more about these workshops? Are there some resources out there whereby they go to find them? Let me start with you, Helen.

Tang: The place to go would be hp.com/go/dct.

Gardner: That’s pretty straightforward. Any other thoughts Mark and Mark about where you could go to pursue information if you were starting to get interested in these workshops?

Edelmann: Well, it’s probably not a big surprise, but to learn more about the CI Maturity Model, you can go to hp.com/go/cimm.

Gardner: And Mark Grindle?

Grindle: I agree with both of those. Obviously your HP account rep can help you. We have an HP IT Forum coming up soon. For people who are attending, we do mini workshops during this event. We set up a day that individual customers can come in for an hour and we walk them through each one of the panels very quickly and give them a flavor for what the full workshop would look like. There are a lot of options here for people to get a better understanding of the workshop and how it can help them.

Gardner: So, you can get the appetizer before the entrée?

Grindle: Absolutely.

Gardner: Well, thank you. You have been listening to a sponsored podcast discussion on the need for DCT and some proven ways that explore how to do DCT effectively.

I would like to thank our guests. We have been joined by Helen Tang, Solutions Lead for Data Center Transformation and Converged Infrastructure Solutions for HP Enterprise Business. Thanks again, Helen,

Tang: Thanks, Dana. Always a pleasure.

Gardner: And Mark Edelmann, Senior Program Manager, HP’s Enterprise Storage, Servers, and Networking Business Unit. Thanks to you, Mark.

Edelmann: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: And lastly, Mark Grindle, Business Consultant, Data Center Infrastructure Services in the Technology Services within HP Enterprise Business. Thanks to you.

Grindle: Thank you, Dana. It was great being here.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Thanks for listening and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Learn more. Sponsor: HP.

Transcript of a sponsored podcast discussion on two HP workshops that help businesses determine actual IT needs and provide a roadmap for improving data center operations and efficiency.Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.

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Hastening Trends Around Cloud, Mobile Push Application Transformation as Priority, Says Research

Edited transcript of a sponsored podcast discussion on converging forces compelling enterprises to take a close look at their application portfolios.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to BriefingsDirect.

Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion on the fast-moving trends supporting the rationale for application transformation. We will see how these same trends are pointing to a deeper payoff from the well-managed embrace of hybrid computing models.

An added requirement for application transformation is to make them available more securely, even in these hybrid implementations, while adding automation and governance features across their entire service lifecycle. We also have some new research that describes how top level enterprise executives are reacting to these fast-moving trends, buffeting nearly all global businesses. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Lastly, we'll examine some new products and services from HP designed to help companies move safely, yet directly, to transform their applications, improve their hosting options, and free up resources that can be used to provide the innovation needed to support better business processes. It's and the support of business processes, after all, that’s the real goal of these activities.

I'm here with an HP application transformation expert to dig into the new research and to better understand HP’s response to these market and technology shifts. Please join me now in welcoming Paul Evans, Worldwide Lead for Application Transformation for HP Enterprise Business. Welcome back, Paul.

Paul Evans: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: Let's dig into these some of these trends. We're looking at things that are moving very rapidly. We have some mega trends. We're looking at new business models. We're still digging our way out of a very deep recession. Paul, give me the landscape, if you will, of what’s going on and why now is such an opportune time to look at applications.

Evans: We see three mega trends, and we validate this with customers. We haven’t just made these up. And, the three mega trends really come down to firstly that people are evolving their business models.

When you get recessionary periods, hyper growth in particular markets, and the injection of new technologies, people look at how to make money and how to save money. They look at their business model and see they can make a change there. Of course, if you change the business model, then that means you change the business process. If you change the business process, the digital expression of a business process is an application. So, people need to change their apps.

So, you change your model and the process and need to change your app, because for most people now, the app is pretty much the digital expression of their business. For many of us, when we go online or do some form of transaction, at the end of the day, it’s an app that is authenticating this, validating the transaction, making the transaction, whatever it may be. That’s one mega trend we see happening.

The second mega trend is that technology innovation just keeps on going, whether it’s the infusion of cloud architectures that people are looking towards, or the whole mega trend around mobile connectivity. That is a game changer in their mind. It’s a radical transformational time for applications, as they accommodate and exploit those technologies.

No precedent

Some people just accommodate them and say, "Okay, we can do things better, maybe less expensively. We can be more innovative, more flexible in this way, or maybe we can do things differently. Maybe we can do things like we have never ever done them before."

I don’t believe there's any precedent for the mobile evolution that we're going to see coming towards us through smartphones, pads, or whatever it may be.

We can't look back over our shoulder and say, "What we did five years ago we'll just do that again, and it will be wonderful." I don’t think there is any precedent here. There is an opportunity for people to do some really innovative things.

Third, it’s the whole nature of the changing workforce. The expectations of people that are joining with the community every day on the net is very different from the people at the other end of the spectrum and their experience.

When we look at young people joining the net and when we look at young people coming into the workforce, their expectation is very high in terms of what they want, what they need, and what they would like to achieve. This is in terms of the tools they utilize, whether it’s social networking, whether it’s just the fact that their view is that they are sort of always on the network, whether it’s through their mobile or whether it’s through their notebook or whatever device they use.

When we look at young people joining the net and when we look at young people coming into the workforce, their expectation is very high.

They're always on, and therefore the expectations of those people who are going to be with us now for the next 60-70 years is starting from a position of, we have always known the web, we have always liked the web, we have always had the web. So their view is, we just want to see more of it and better. We want to see things as services rather than processes. The expectation of those people is also having a lot of effect. Those three mega trends affect the way that organizations have to respond.

Gardner: Applications, of course, have been very important for quite some time, whether the computing model was mainframe or client-server, or distributed web. What strikes me as different now, Paul, is that these applications are coming from different places, and we're using bits and pieces of applications to support processes and we need to have them accessible at any given time, hence your instant-on. We're looking at not only a shift in technology, but even the definition of an application is up for grabs. Would you agree with that?

Evans: Oh yeah, and this area is so close to my heart. There were days when you got most of your apps from the IT function, because they were central. So you got a window onto them. You got a device that allowed you to access them.

We went through the PC revolution and we all wandered off to the store on weekends and bought that shrink-wrapped software, which, of course, drove the IT function crazy, because then every desktop was different and we got support issues.

Then, you wanted a bigger PC because you were running more software, even though the IT function didn’t actually support the software. So, you had sort of anarchy breaking out. Then you had the response to the anarchy which was, "No, there will be a desktop. It will be this. It will have this suite of software. And, God forbid you put anything extra on it.

So, people did the obvious thing. Well, they said, okay, fine, we'll do it at home then. They built an environment at home that reflected their lifestyle, their wants, their preferences, their platforms, and apps.

Mobile platform

Then, the walls started to come down, because once we got into this whole notion of the mobile platform, people realized that they can sit at home and download apps, a lot of them for non-business purposes, games, or whatever, but a lot of them for data access, data manipulation, and data presentation.

So, there were a lot of guys sitting at home in the evening -- and when I say guys, I mean in the generic sense, male and female -- saying, "I can do this better. I can make this look nicer. I can do this processing on a device that I can just sit on my couch while watching the TV and do something with."

The whole expectation around the application is changing and I think it’s irreversible. We're not going to go backwards. We're going to keep on driving forward, because people like HP and others see the real value here. We're going to start to have a different approach to apps. It’s going to be more component driven and it’s not going to be monolithic.

We have to go away from the monolithic app anyway, because it’s not a flexible device. It's not something that easily delivers innovation and agility. People have already understood that the cost of maintaining those monolithic, legacy applications is not acceptable.

On the front side of that, there are people who say that the future holds great things. The future holds the ability for us to not only download apps, but maybe download components of apps. Whereas mashups today are in the realm of the more technically oriented, mashups are going to find their way into our everyday life.

The future holds the ability for us to not only download apps, but maybe download components of apps.

People do it today. They send an email to their friend and say, "By the way, if you want to come to my house, here is the link to the map with the driving direction." It’s a very simple mashup, but it's something that is very effective.

We're going to get far more sophisticated in how we do those things, and they'll be tailored to this whole notion of context awareness. So, they'll understand where they are and what they're doing. Things will change by virtue of the context of the person, where they're based or what device they are using.

I really get excited by the fact we're just starting down that road, and there is a lot of good stuff more to come.

Gardner: So, people are going to have the ability with their business processes, just as they do in their personal lives, to intercept and react to events, to data, and to changes. They're going to do this 24x7, based on what works for them or what’s important for those business processes.

It sounds like we’re into an instant-on enterprise always and forever. That's the vision. It seems inevitable. Many organizations are well into this, but it seems that CIOs are caught in the middle, if the expectations are high, but their capabilities are rooted in the past.

What's going on with these higher-level business executives who see and appreciate the vision and understand how this will benefit their business, but aren’t quite sure how to get there?

Blurring lines

Evans: You're right. You put it in a nutshell. In a way it's sad when we say our personal lives and our business lives are blurred into one. If I'm talking to a lot of customers at the same time, maybe I’ve got a regional audience, I'll ask how many people do email on their holiday? I never actually want to know the answer, because I know what the answer is going to be. About 95 percent of the hands go up.

So, do we ever switch off? The answer is probably no. Maybe we just switch off a little bit of the time, but this whole notion these days of always on, instant-on, or whatever is something that unfortunately is here to stay. We just have to be somewhat disciplined, sometimes saying that we don’t need to be on today. We could afford a day off.

If I'm a CIO or in senior leadership of any organization, I look one way and I see that the apps are actually running my business today or they’re making my profit, measuring my profit, measuring my revenue. Those apps have a real value, because they have embedded intellectual property that means something.

It's not a productivity app. Productivity apps are relatively straightforward, because you could get that from somewhere else. I could potentially get it at a different price, and we really do talk to our customers very hard about that.

We tell them to understand what's core to the business and understand what is productivity. Because if it's productivity, which is not going to give you any fundamental differentiation, then you really should be purchasing at the lowest possible price.

If you're looking at core applications, something that is fundamental to your business, they're not so easy to just move around.

You can look at an on-premise supply, you can look at off-premise, you can look at outsourcing or out-tasking, or you can look to the cloud. There are a lot more choices available to people who maybe could lower the cost, and that has a direct impact on the bottom line.

But, if you're looking at core applications, something that is fundamental to your business, they're not so easy to just move around. The CIO looks at those and say, "I’ve got this massive investment. What do I do?" Then, he swings around and sees the world of cloud and mobile heading towards them and says, "Now I'm challenged, because the CFO or CEO is telling me I need performance improvement, if I need to get into these new markets whatever it maybe."

At the same time, they needs to cut cost, be really innovative, and explore all these new technologies. He wants to understand what he's going to do with the old ones, which may take money and funding to achieve. At the same time, he wants to exploit and be innovative with the new. That’s a very difficult position to sit in the middle of and not feel the stretches and strains.

We sit with the CEOs on their side of the table and try and understand the balance of what business is looking to achieve, whether that would be improvement in product delivery or marketing and customer satisfaction. The things that people look to a technology group for and say, "Our website experience is losing its market share. Do something about it," that’s in the CIO’s regime. He looks around the other way and says, "But, I have got all these line of business guys that also want me to keep on making product or making whatever and I need to understand what I do with legacy."

So, we sit on their side of the table and say let's make a list, let's prioritize, let's understand some of the fundamentals of good business and your technology and come up with a list of actionable items. You got to have a plan that is not 12 months, because this is not a 12-month thing.

Gardner: You and I spoke recently about the pace here. We’ve seen the transitions over the past 15 or 20 years, but I don’t think either one of us has seen anything happen quite as rapidly as this mobile, cloud, data, and behavioral shift. They all reinforce one another. Now, you wanted to plumb into that and find out a bit more. So, you’ve done some research. Here in the spring of 2011, people understand that the stopwatch has been clicked, the time is ticking. What were some of your findings?

Fundamental audience

Evans: We actually went to the C-suite -- the CEO, CIO, and CFO -- and just tried to understand from them how they see things, because they are clearly a fundamental audience that we need to work with and understand their opinions and how their opinions have changed.

Two or three years ago, during the heavy economic times, cost was all it was all about. Take cost out. Take cost out. Don’t worry about the functionality; I need to take cost out. Now, that’s changed. We've seen, both from the public and the private sector, the view that we've got to be innovative. Innovation is going to be the way we keep ourselves different, keep ourselves alive the way we move forward.

A business requirement is that we need to innovate. If we stand still, we're probably going backwards. I know that sounds ridiculous, but you have do more than just keep up to speed. You've got to accelerate. And, we asked the C-suite if innovation therefore is important.

Ninety five percent of the people we talked to said innovation is key to the success of the organization. As I said, that was both public and private. Of course, the private sector would, but why would the public sector, because they don't have any competition? But, they are serving citizens who have expectations and want the same level of service that we see from a private organization in the public domain.

So, one, the audience said to us that innovation is key. Two, we didn’t see any massive difference between public and private. Then, we asked them how they relate innovation and technology. Basically, they told us that technology is the innovation engine. It is the thing that makes them innovative. They're going to have new products and new services, but whether the technology is involved in the front end or the back end of that, it’s involved. It’s not an administration function anymore. It's the life blood of what they do.

They told us that technology is the innovation engine. It is the thing that makes them innovative.

So it's not HP saying this. It's our customer saying to us that technology would be the engine that they will use to be innovative going forward. We told them, "Well, technology is a big thing. Are are we talking about mobiles? Are we talking about blade servers? What do you see?

Applications and software that derive more flexible process was the number one area where they would invest first, across all the audiences. So, their view was that they know there are lots of pieces for technology, but if they want to innovate, they see that applications and software is the vehicle that gets them there.

Gardner: They really want to see the expression of the technology and not to be so consumed with the technology itself.

Evans: As I said earlier, we use this term that technology is the digital expression of the business process. It is the business process, and we do it in a digital environment, in a digital fabric, you might say.

Actually, customers will say, "Do you agree with this or disagree with this? What do you think?" And we can give them any of our opinions to start with, but unanimously CEO, CFO, CIO came back and said that applications and software are what it's all about.

Focus on applications

There were three times more votes for that than the second place choice, which was to invest in more people. What it’s saying is that we could apply more people to our process, but way ahead of anything was that we've got to focus on applications in software.

Gardner: You're not going to succeed, if you can’t do that. How is HP responding to this? Now that you understand that their priorities are becoming more in tune with where you've seen the market going for some time, what is your response? What do you take back from that?

Evans: For a long time, it felt like we are bashing our head against a brick wall. We've seen that clients are spending 70-80 percent of their IT budgets on maintenance. The smart guys in the company look around and say that doesn't feel right.

Around 2005, internally, we had a new CIO, Randy Mott come on board. He looked around and clearly felt that there was room for improvement. Our IT costs were not great -- about four percent of revenue, which for an IT organization wasn’t bad. His view was that he could get it down to two, and could make it more flexible, more adaptive, more agile, and more innovative at the same time.

It’s a well-documented case study that HP went through this rationalization, this application portfolio. We went from 7,000 apps to 2,000. Then, we turn our attention to our customers and we see our customers struggling with the same thing.

Since the downturn, there's been a reawakening. Not only are you going to save money, but you're going to do more with less in terms of financials.

For the last year or two, we felt sometimes like an endangered species and banging our heads against the wall saying that we believe it’s the portfolio. Some people, although they appreciated the advice, sometimes ignored it. Maybe before the economic downturn, their view was that is was costing a lot of money, but they could afford a lot of money.

Since the downturn, there's been a reawakening. Not only are you going to save money, but you're going to do more with less in terms of financials. More importantly, you're going to have to get some differential innovation going.

If you look like anybody else, why is anyone going to come to you? If you're going to commoditize, some companies may not want to live in a commoditized environment. So, they need to be different. They need to have something special and treat their customers, products, or services in a different way.

We've been actively on this trail of wanting to help customers get hold of those portfolios, and, you might say, do a bit of spring cleaning. With the acquisition of EDS, we got a lot of people who not so much understood HP, but actually understood other than those environments, so that we could bridge that gap. When a customer says, "I'm running a mainframe. You probably don’t understand those," yes, we do.

What to keep

When a CIO says, "What do I do now? What do I go with? The bulk of my apps are running on the mainframe, and I have a funny feeling I don’t need to do that," we can have a joined-up conversation about how they can migrate from that environment and we understand the nuances. We don't just say to take everything is off the mainframe. We're not that naïve. We try to understand what they should keep, what they should change, and what they should retire.

Gardner: Paul, we've spoken a bit about a changed set of requirements here. It’s not just a matter of sloughing off old apps and it’s not just a matter of moving from one compute style to another. We're talking about transformation in terms of what applications actually are, where they come from internal clouds, on premises, or maybe from external clouds. But, we also need to make sure that we've got security and automation, otherwise it doesn’t scale. It becomes more chaotic, and we also need to govern across these different hosting environments.

So, it’s really a very substantial undertaking. How is it that these people don’t feel overwhelmed? What do you bring to them in terms of products and services that helps set the table rather than put them into a deep depression?

Evans: Well, there's nothing I can do about depression, but I’ll try. Anyone who's been keeping their eyes on HP for a while would have seen some significant investments, especially in the software area,, and this preceded the research where customers are telling us that apps and software are pretty important.

The investments in companies like ArcSight and Fortify have been there because, as they say in ice hockey terms, we're trying to predict where the puck is going to go, and we're trying to move towards where the puck will be, as opposed to where it is now.

We've been investing in acquisitions, but also investing in internal R&D, looking at the customer’s environment to see what things are really top of mind.

We've been investing in acquisitions, but also investing in internal R&D, looking at the customer’s environment to see what things are really top of mind. Effectively, we know this change is irreversible. The technology industry, whether you like it or not, never goes backwards.

As I heard on a television program, we are compelled to travel into the future. It’s not being corny. That’s what we're doing. We're looking at this, so the new range of products and services that we're bringing out are around several of those core areas.

One, is that people need to get a real good handle on what they've got. A lot of CIOs we meet and a lot of people we talk to the IT function will openly admit that they have a no clear idea what their portfolio looks like. They don’t know how much it’s costing them. They don’t know what the components are. They don’t know how well they're aligned for the business.

They don’t know what sort of technology underpinnings they've got and what sort of security level they're implementing. That sounds like a pretty terrible picture, but unfortunately it’s pretty much reality. There are definite clients we meet who do know, but they're pretty rare.

Gardner: That's what I find as well -- people really don't know what they’ve got.

Application portfolio management

Evans: You’ve to get your head around that first, because if you don't know what you’ve got, then how the hell can you move forward? So, we've invested a lot in Application Portfolio Management, a new software product, combined that with a whole portfolio of services to exploit it, which really gives people a very rich graphical environment and the ability to understand the portfolio and make decisions.

That's an area we're paying real attention to, because we believe that unless people get that clear line of sight on their sampled portfolio, they're going to have a challenge. Basically, we get a lot of questions. One is, "I've got an applications portfolio. What should I move to the cloud, assuming it’s private? Should I move all of it?" It's probably unlikely you're going to move everything to the cloud, because moving stuff like intellectual property may not be such a good idea.

This whole notion of where we've been in the past -- service-oriented architecture (SOA) and shared services -- is a real underpinning. Some people think SOA died. SOA did not die. It's actually one of the technological underpinnings for going forward in creating these shared services which we're going to be calling a cloud environment.

We tell people we can help them understand which apps are fit to go to the cloud and should go to the cloud. This is how we get them to the cloud. By the way, we'll also tell you the ones that shouldn't.

We get that question a lot. Of course, when you talk cloud, you invariably get people talking about the biggest excuse not to go to cloud, which is that it's not secure.

Unfortunately, there are unscrupulous people who know their way around certain bolt-ons, and have a way of infiltrating.

As I said, we're into irreversible change. We know there may be challenges, which is why the acquisition of companies like ArcSight and Fortify, and what we have brought out recently with the application securities in the product have really changed the rules on security, not to view this as a bolt on.

Anybody that is familiar with the notion of a stack knows we go from hardware at the bottom to application at the top with all the intermediate layers. We could bolt on a security enhancement to a piece of the stack with the view that we’ll stop you coming in.

Unfortunately, as you are aware, there are unscrupulous people who know their way around certain bolt-ons, and have a way of infiltrating. From reports in the press, it’s very clear about what can happen when they do. We've taken is a totally different approach.

Make security something that is inherent within the whole process. So that once you are through the gatekeeper, you can't just have a lot of fun and games inside the code. Once you are in, you're not going to get very far. Also, monitor this in real-time. Don't make this a static process, make it a dynamic process, so that you can dynamically see vulnerabilities and react to those in real-time.

So, it would be the software is saying that it's going to stop this, and stop us from having a problem. There's a big investment for us in this whole notion of security.

Gardner: The security cuts across these products. You’ve talked about an application portfolio management product. What else is coming out here in April?

Hybrid delivery

Evans: Well, obviously, this whole notion of hybrid delivery with the cloud, and looking at different models to deliver things. People are coming to us and saying that they have some productivity applications that maybe they shouldn't be running in an extremely expensive environment. We see a lot of people who run an app on a mainframe. We ask why, and the user responds because they always have. Maybe it's time that it didn’t.

If you're short of cash and trying to be innovative, why would you want to spend a whole truck of cash on something that you don't need to. Go and spend it on something you should.

We need to help people understand how they can migrate their productivity up. Microsoft Exchange is a good example. Big productivity -- messaging is a productivity. Yes, it helps people do what they do every day.

If I'm running Exchange, I can move this to a private cloud environment, still within my firewall. The biggest challenge everybody faces is . how do you provision for it? How much infrastructure do I need to give people the response they are looking for?

The point is how to separate environments that can smooth those peaks and troughs. We believe exchange services for private cloud is the way to do that.

Now, everyone runs out of processing power and everyone runs out of storage. I do every day, especially storage. But, the point is how to separate environments that can smooth those peaks and troughs. We believe exchange services for private cloud is the way to do that.

The flip side is that people that are using the Microsoft Dynamics customer relationship management (CRM) package. Maybe they don’t want to be in the CRM business. They want to build relationships with customers, want to understand who they are and
what they are. Maybe they don’t want to be in the whole provisioning business.

So, what we're offering is what we call Enterprise Cloud Services for Microsoft Dynamics CRM, which says we will put this on our service. The customer just buys a service through the net and pays per usage. If they don’t use it, they don’t pay.

We're going to see a lot more of that style of hybrid delivery where you pay per use. What I want, I use, and I pay for. What I don’t want, I put it back. I don’t have to take any responsibility for infrastructure and storage and all the stuff that goes with it. I want to give that responsibility to someone else and get on with my core business.

Gardner: Let me make sure I understand. You're talking about Microsoft Exchange, email collaboration, personal information manager (PIM). These are very important and aren’t going away, but the way in which you utilize your resources might shift. I think you are saying it's a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, but not necessarily, purely a SaaS model. It’s kind of shared services -- consume as you need and then pay as you consume.

SaaS model

Evans: It’s a SaaS model and other options. There was a model once where everyone was on premises. Then, the whole notion of outsourcing came in, and people looked at that and felt it was pretty good. So, they went to outsourcing.

We believe that this whole notion will be called "hybrid delivery." It will be a mixture of all of them -- on premises, off premised, people running services inside their firewall as private clouds. It’s actually a public provision service where it will be provisioned for them outside their firewall and then they buy what they want.

Also, one of the components of the announcement we are bringing out is what we call Cloud Service Automation, which we're extremely proud of. This is really for the people who want to get a cloud service up and running, want to do it fast, and don’t want to have to spend the next two years playing computer scientist. They want to get up, running, provisioned, and out there.

It just shows the pace of this market. We brought version one of this product out in January. In April, we're bringing out the next version with a significant level of enhancement around provisioning and manageability, and 4000 scripts embedded. So, people can just assemble things.

Back to the question you asked me earlier about the way the apps are going, this is really assembling procedures where the customer wants to do and can through a drag-and-drop environment. Some people view that as nearly impossible.

This is what we call fundamental building blocks of people that are looking to deploy a cloud environment.

Cloud Service Automation runs on the cloud system, which is enabled by BladeSystem Matrix. What that’s doing is provisioning an infrastructure, giving people the choices of network components, upgrading systems, and their virtualization environment. All of this is through drag-and-drop. It's just staring at the screen and saying they want Linux on that, HP-UX on that, Windows on that, and a VMware on that, and then drop it on.

Then, taking applications again, they want a database here, and all of this by magic happens in the background. And then the real clever bit will provision this for 10,000 transactions an hour. All of a sudden, they hit 11,000 transactions. Now, what happens? We can already program it so that, if we hit 11,000, we're going to burst out and go to another service provider, who we trust, that will take that peak loading. When the peak loading is complete, it will return back into the original environment.

So this is what we call fundamental building blocks of people that are looking to deploy a cloud environment.

Gardner: This sounds exciting, because we're giving people really what they want, which is the ability to be flexible. We are giving the architect the role of deciding how systems work, rather than the administrator, but you are also targeting some very important application sets, collaboration and communication and then CRM.

But if this works for those two application sets, it should work for others. So, I assume that this is just the beginning in terms of the applications you are going to be giving the same treatment?

Irreversible change

Evans: Well, I think we can blue sky it out and say that this is the way it’s going to be. As I said, irreversible change, compelled to travel in the future, all that. But, there is some real sort of down to earth tactical things you’ve got to think about.

Take for example, the client environment. We’ve talked a lot about the server, but the client world is changing at a high speed by virtue of people’s desire to use devices that are not chained to the desk anymore -- whether that’s more portable, notebook type machines, smartphones, pads or whatever. You’ve also got to take into account the fact that there are a lot of enterprise applications that you still use on traditional desktop PCs. You can't ignore those and should not.

A year after launching, about 13 percent of the Windows XP base moved to Windows Vista. So, the bulk of the market stayed with XP for whatever reason. Now,. they're saying they need to make that move, but some of these desktop apps are pretty sophisticated. This is not just simple productivity stuff. This is a part of the enterprise portfolio. Therefore, they also need to get worried about it big time and fairly quickly.

So what we’ve done for our customers is to look at their volume, their desktop environment, and come up with what apps they've got, what they do, are they useful, do they need all of them, could they get rid of some? The ones they want to move forward, do they need to change? Obviously, there are functional differences between XP and Windows 7.

We know all the gotchas. When you’ve used the special feature inside XP, we know how that will translate to Windows 7.

We’ve got some background in this. We’ve got some skills. We’ve actually set up a factory environment, because we think this is a volume thing. This is not ones and twos. This is volume.

By virtue of our knowledge and experience we can give you a very good return on your investment because we know all of the differences. We know all the gotchas. When you’ve used the special feature inside XP, we know how that will translate to Windows 7.

By the way, we can also tell you some things in Windows 7 that you maybe want to use, because that could make your environment more secure, more robust, more whatever. So we’re setting that up as a piece of our application transformation portfolio. As I said, it's not just the client world, but it's the server world as well.

Gardner: How about some examples? Do you have any folks that have been doing this already, that are deploying in this fashion, leveraging for innovation, transforming applications, targeting certain apps and then taking them to a hybrid model? Tell me a little bit about them and what the payoffs are? It's still perhaps a little hypothetical to say if you do this, you get blank, but what's actually happening on the street?

Evans: We’ve actually set up a new program called The Re-Inventors. These are people who have taken a position that innovation is what it's about. The status-quo is not going to get them to where they're going to be. Our first re-inventor came from DreamWorks and talks about the exploitation of fundamental technologies from HP.

Public sector

The second re-inventor we’re announcing is the Flemish Government. Although they're in the public sector, their view was that they cannot continue with paper-based processes. They're inaccurate, inefficient, and ineffective. We’re promoting that as a part of our re-inventors program who demonstrated that they took a very much a paper-based environment and put it into the digital world. They used the digital expression, and are providing a level of service to their citizens that is second to none.

As I said, there is always this view that the public sector has no competition, so why do they have to do this, but they do. If people have the right motivations, and a sense of service, deploying the digitally-based solutions, rather than manual, is absolutely the way to go. That’s what we’re talking about in terms of this new re-inventors program and specifically the Flemish Government.

Gardner: For those folks who have not yet taken the plunge, but see the writing on the wall, how does one get started? How can we learn more about the research that you’ve done and some of the findings and also some of these products that you run out during April.

Evans: People just need to get to their heads around it, because we appreciate it. There are some big questions to answer. We don’t trivialize this. This is not a game. This is serious. Serious problems need serious people to respond.

We have our traditional URL, which is relatively simple, hp.com/go/applicationtransformation. There, you can then go off and explore things that will interest you.

This is not a game. This is serious. Serious problems need serious people to respond.

At a higher level, if people are interested in this whole Re-inventors Program, we have another URL which may be an even better starting point -- www.hp.com/go/instanton. There you can learn about the Re-inventors Program, whether app trends, hybrid delivery, or whatever. It's meant to be a resource pool, where you can just sit down and say, "I'm interested in this. Can I find the persons in the same industry as me doing this. Can I go and read about that?"

In the application transformation space as, we set up a TV channel on what we call HP TV. There is a link on the website. You can listen to HP material. You can listen to customers -- the Italian Ministry of Education or the New York Stock Exchange, among others. You can hear Gartner analysts talk about the future of applications, what this whole notion of context-aware or cloud or mobility means. Massimo Pezzini from Gartner is on there talking about that.

We're saying to people that we're trying to help. If they want more, they can come and tell us, whether it's the whole program, which is this whole instant-on program, or whether it’s dropping down into any one of the solution areas like app transformation.

It tells people not only that here’s HP and this is what we do, but we also believe people need some context. It's not only HP, but I want to understand what other people think. We're trying to create that sort of pull. So, we have a link on the CIO Magazine for people who want to join a community.

We're just trying to help people see that this is really important. We have been sort of screaming and shouting for the last year or two, and we believe that people are really onto this now. HP has a role to play in pointing people in the right direction.

Gardner: Thank you Paul. We've been listening to a sponsored podcast discussion on the fast moving trends and some new product supporting the need for application transformation and leveraging hybrid computing models. I want to thank our guest. We've been here with Paul Evans, Worldwide Lead for Application Transformation for HP Enterprise Business. Thanks so much, Paul.

Evans: Thanks, Dana.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Thanks for listening and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Edited transcript of a sponsored podcast discussion on converging forces compelling enterprises to take a close look at their application portfolios. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.

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