Tuesday, June 15, 2010

HP's Anton Knolmar on Seeking Innovations to Enterprise IT Challenges at Software Universe Conference

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast with HP's Anton Knolmar on the innovations and customer outreach from software conference in Washington, DC.

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

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series, coming to you from the HP Software Universe 2010 Conference in Washington D.C. We're here the week of June 14, 2010, to explore some major enterprise software and solutions trends and innovations making news across HP’s ecosystem of customers, partners, and developers.

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions and I'll be your host throughout this series of HP sponsored Software Universe Live discussions.

We're now joined by Anton Knolmar, Vice President of Marketing for HP Software & Solutions. Welcome to the podcast, Anton.

Anton Knolmar: Hi, Dana.

Gardner: You're welcoming folks to the show, there’s a very big crowd here in Washington, in a new facility. Tell us a little bit about what is exciting and new for our attendees and why this is a particularly big event for HP.

Knolmar: HP Software Universe has quite a history. It’s not the first time that we're running this. A big thing for this year, especially for Americans, is that we're moving out of Las Vegas, where we were for the last couple of years, to Washington.

First, we wanted to get a different staging and we wanted to attract our public-sector customers. That’s an important thing for us, because we do a lot of business here. That’s one of the reasons we've moved to Washington.

We're really excited, as we have a fully packed agenda from Tuesday until Friday with mainstage sessions and 200 track sessions. We have a dedicated Executive Track and we have a combined solution showcase, where we have our HP product experts, our service professionals, and our key partners together.

We have awards of excellence and partner summits. So, we're really trying to get the entire ecosystem that has already deployed our solutions, from a customer and a partner perspective here, but also prospects in Washington. I'm happy to tell you that all the hotel rooms are booked. So, we're fully packed in the middle of Washington to try to bring across the best of what we have from our Software and Solutions portfolio.

Gardner: And, this event is happening, I think, at a fairly auspicious time. There’s a lot going on in the industry. Many people are referring to it as an inflection point. Why do you think this is an important juncture in the evolution of IT and business?

Knolmar: As you said, there are a lot of things going on at the moment around virtualization, cloud, outsourcing, on-premise, off-premise. I think that over the next five or six years, there will be an even greater disruptions in how organizations adopt and use technology.

If you look around, there are a couple of facts which are really critical. There will be a 100 percent increase in the number of virtual machines from 2009 to 2012 and a 43 percent growth in virtualized applications. Mobile devices will grow even more.

A lot of things are happening at the moment around those different areas, around mobile devices, cloud, and virtualization, as well as around the information explosion for the foreseeable future.

Ahead of the game

D
efinitely, from an HP and from an HP Software & Solutions perspective, we want to be ahead of this game and provide the appropriate level for our customers, so that they can be future ready with whatever we provide them. They can deploy it. They can deploy it better. They can deploy it more simply. They can integrate more simply. And, they can use this stuff to give them, our customers, a competitive advantage against their competitors.

Gardner: One of the things I hear a lot in the field is a concern about how to control and manage the complexity that’s going on. As I look at various new sourcing opportunities, perhaps adopting some cloud models themselves, they're worried about the issue of governance. Is that another big part of the picture today?

Knolmar: It's definitely a big part of the picture, because technologies like virtualization and cloud, which we just discussed, represent the biggest disruption in the technology environment since client-server.

But, unlike client-server, the entire enterprise is not just going on one service delivery method or another. We believe that enterprises will have hybrid technologies, as well as a hybrid application environment.

This hybrid environment will be created from enterprise sourcing services from a variety of service delivery models. It will require a set of tools that can manage the service irrespective of where it comes from, either from in-house, physical, virtual, outsource, or via the cloud.

These new delivery models will be directly related to how they can manage and how they can automate them, irrespective of where they are sourced or where they are running.



The ability to benefit from these advances is where our customers are struggling. These new delivery models will be directly related to how they can manage and how they can automate them, irrespective of where they are sourced or where they are running.

That’s one key piece of our announcement. What we can get across from this event in Washington is to explain our customers how we can help them to speed up time-to-innovation by reducing the risk. On the other hand, they can get ready by building a management environment that is ready for the next big thing.

Also, we can explain to our customers how we can simplify, integrate, and automate to gain, as I mentioned before, a competitive advantage from the new technologies. What’s clear to everyone is that one size fits no one. So, enterprises will need to have multiple sourcing options for their applications.

Gardner: Of course, to that same thought, community effect is quite prominent nowadays. Events like this certainly give people opportunity to get together, do some brainstorming, compare notes, and learn from each other. So, we're certainly looking forward to these mainstage events and hearing the news from HP. Tell me, if you could, how these events tend to enliven the community itself.

Knolmar: I think what those events offer to us is the two-pronged approach that we're seeing at the moment. Definitely, it’s our biggest user gathering, and what we're trying to do is get live customers together face-to-face. But, that’s only one piece.

What we're also doing for the first time is web streaming our content to different parts of the world, so that we really can reach out much more broadly. We're also building up a kind of HP Software & Solutions community. We have other ways of doing this and are using the social media capabilities as well. [Search for conference goings-on at Twitter on #HPSWU.]

We're connecting our customer community in a better way to bring those pieces together, even the different persona levels. Basically, we're drilling down from a CIO level, via the VP or IT manager, down to the other areas, where we have more of a practitioner level.

For this show specifically, people can even follow us on Twitter and on Facebook. It’s really a big thing for us to be investing in these kinds of new areas and reaching out as broadly as we can do here to the different target audiences and using all these new capabilities which are out there.

Gardner: Well, great. I'm certainly looking forward to hearing more about the show as it unfolds over the next several days. I want to thank you for joining us. We've been here with Anton Knolmar, Vice President of Marketing for HP Software & Solutions, learning about what to expect at the Software Universe Conference. Thank you, Anton.

Knolmar: Thank you.

Gardner: And, thanks to our audience for joining us for this special BriefingsDirect podcast, coming to you from the HP Software Universe 2010 Conference in Washington, DC. Look for other podcasts from this HP event on the hp.com website, as well as via the BriefingsDirect network.

I'm Dana Gardner; Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this series of HP sponsored Software Universe Live discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.

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

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast with HP's Anton Knolmar on the innovations and customer outreach from software conference in Washington, DC. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2010. All rights reserved.

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