Q&A: HP focuses on data center automation

HP's Ann Livermore shares the company's vision to enable automated data center management, reducing labor and energy costs for customers.

HP’s software business accounts for less than 2% of revenue, but that makes it a $2 billion business, meaning HP is the sixth largest software vendor worldwide. HP says its software assets, anchored by the OpenView management toolset, is central to its efforts to help companies automate IT. Network World Senior Editor Denise Dubie sat down with HP's Ann Livermore, executive vice president of the Technology Solutions Group, to learn more.

Since you acquired Mercury, HP has been touting its software business. Why is software so critical now?

We are excited about our software strategy. It's become a real center point for us, and all the services capabilities we have around it. We see an opportunity for HP to be the company you think of to automate IT. We've launched this Business Technology Optimization portfolio which brings all of the OpenView assets, the Mercury assets and the assets of other acquisitions we’ve done over the past two or three years into this portfolio, and we have a market lead position in each of the functions.

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HP’s software business accounts for less than 2% of revenue, but that makes it a $2 billion business, meaning HP is the sixth largest software vendor worldwide. HP says its software assets, anchored by the OpenView management toolset, is central to its efforts to help companies automate IT. Network World Senior Editor Denise Dubie sat down with HP's Ann Livermore, executive vice president of the Technology Solutions Group, to learn more.

Since you acquired Mercury, HP has been touting its software business. Why is software so critical now?

We are excited about our software strategy. It's become a real center point for us, and all the services capabilities we have around it. We see an opportunity for HP to be the company you think of to automate IT. We've launched this Business Technology Optimization portfolio which brings all of the OpenView assets, the Mercury assets and the assets of other acquisitions we’ve done over the past two or three years into this portfolio, and we have a market lead position in each of the functions.

The strategic significance of IT automation is big. The least automated part of most companies is IT. It's almost like the shoemaker's children. Customers automate ERP, they automate sales activities, closing their finances and they automate HR. And then you step back and say, how many companies have automated IT functions? Not many. Most have combinations of small company software that is not very well tied together.

How are you going to move customers from bits of automation here and there to a fully automated IT environment?

We are focused on how you build what we describe as self-managing data centers. Taking this idea of software automating IT, we think there is a whole new approach to how you build data centers that take a lot less labor to manage. It gets back to the same core problem that 65% of most budgets go toward operating IT and how do we help drive the labor costs down dramatically.

Where do customers stand in terms of automating operations today?

Most companies are not very far along. There are a few examples that we think are real showcases. And we want HP's IT to be a showcase. We are consolidating our data centers into six centers, three pairs. We’ll have some of our big Integrity servers in there for specific applications, but 60% to 70% of the new environment will be a bladed architecture. And we’ll have the power and cooling done in such a way that we believe we’ll save as much as 40% on those costs.

Where do the savings come from?

What we have seen is by doing a thermal assessment and a site plan with our services capabilities, then deploying our Dynamic Smart Cooling technologies, customers can save, depending on their environment, anywhere between 20% and 40% of their data center energy costs.

What’s more, you can't take advantage of a bladed environment unless you can manage the power and cooling. And a bladed environment provides the mechanism to more highly automate. If you think about the enclosure, having built in the storage and server blades, the management software and the virtualization software, the network devices, it's a significantly less labor intensive environment to manage with employees. And then the management is where a lot of the automation comes in. This is where our whole portfolio of software plays an important role. Virtualization is a big component of it as well.