Tuesday, April 12, 2011

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

T
he 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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Friday, March 11, 2011

HP Premier Services Closes Gap Between Single Point of Accountability and Software Sprawl

Transcript of a sponsored podcast on HP's latest integrated IT support services, the HP Software Premier program.

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.

Welcome to a sponsored podcast discussion on how new models for IT support services are required to provide a single point of accountability when multiple software implementations are involved. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of Briefings Direct podcasts.]

Long before cloud and hybrid computing models become a concern, the challenge before IT is how to straddle complexity and how to corral and manage -- as a lifecycle -- the vast software implementations already on-premises.

Even before such models as cloud computing models are added to the mix, IT needs to get a handle on supporting these multiparty software instances, along with the complex integrations and custom extensions across and between them.

Of course, more of these workloads are supported these days by virtualized containers and by a service-level commitment. So, who are you going to call when things go wrong or when maintenance needs to affect one element of the stack without hosing the rest? How do you manage at the service level agreement (SLA), or multiple SLA, level?

Nowadays, the focal point for IT operational success lies not so much in just choosing the software and services mixture, but also in the management and support of these systems.



Not only does IT need a one-hand-to-shake value on comprehensive support more than ever, but IT departments may need to increasingly opt to outsource more of the routine operational tasks and software support to free up their IT knowledge resources and experts for transformation, security initiatives, and new business growth projects.

Nowadays, the focal point for IT operational success lies not so much in just choosing the software and services mixture, but also in the management and support of these systems and implementations and the SLAs as an ecosystem, and that ecosystem must be managed comprehensively with flexibility and for the long-term.

More than ever, finger pointing on who is accountable or responsible amid a diverse and fast-moving software environment cannot be allowed, not in an Instant-On Enterprise.

Consequently, we're here with an executive from HP Software to examine an expanding set of new HP Premier Services that are designed to combine custom software support and consulting expertise to better deliver managed support outcomes across an entire software implementation.

Please join me now in welcoming Anand Eswaran, Vice President, Global Professional Services at HP Software. Welcome back to BriefingsDirect.

Anand Eswaran: The pleasure is mine, Dana.

Gardner: Anand, what is the problem in supporting this level of complexity of multiple systems, multiple types of computing? We're talking about spanning, I suppose, paradigms of computing. How did we get to where we are, and what is it that people need to start thinking about doing differently?

Setting the context

Eswaran: Let me start by at least setting the context on the business problem or customer problem that we're trying to address. One is that, as you just so eloquently explained, IT complexity is increasing by the day. Having multiple vendors accountable for different parts of the IT strategy and IT implementation is a huge problem.

The second dimension of the problem is the software industry paradigm in general. If you look at the software industry and how the software industry works with customers, you have discrete lifecycles through which we touch the customer.

The first is when we actually start to engage with them in solving a business problem for them. We paint the ROI that we could get by virtue of deploying our software solution, and based on that the customer makes a buying decision. Once that buying decision is made, in reality what they have bought is a product, which is the core part of that solution.

The second lifecycle for the customer is when we actually deploy the solution that they purchased. Once we deploy that solution, whether it is the professional services organization of the software company, a channel partner, or a systems integrator (SI), the third step is then that we deploy it in production and then we transition operation and maintenance of it back to the customer.

Taking a step back, if there is a problem, then the customer’s first call is to customer support, which is inside the software organization. And, if the support organization deems that the problem is actually the manner in which the product was implemented and not the product itself, then we transition back to the customer and ask them to contact the organization they used to deploy the product.

At the heart of it what we're trying to do is simplify the complexity of how a customer or an IT organization deals with the complexity of their stack.



Because of the complexity of the solution and because multiple organizations are accountable for different discrete parts of the solution, the customer is left holding the bag on to figure out how to navigate the complexity of the software organization. How do you pinpoint exactly where the problem is and then engage the right party?

So, at the heart of it what we're trying to do is simplify the complexity of how a customer or an IT organization deals with the complexity of their stack.

The second thing is that an IT organization is always striving to flip the ratio of innovation and operations. As you look today, it is 70 percent operations and 30 percent innovation. If you get that single point of accountability, which you so beautifully explained, they can focus more on innovation and supporting the business needs, so that their company can take advantage of greater market share, versus operations and maintaining the stack they already have.

Gardner: It’s interesting, because a lot of the rationale that I hear from moving to cloud computing in general is because of a failure to manage this complexity. But, maybe the solution is to manage the complexity, before you start moving into additional models.

Is cloud as a trend fueling this? What else is behind the need to get a better handle on multiple instances of software?

Eswaran: One is the loud and clear feedback from the customers. As we look back in the last two years of Customer Advisory Boards we do, where we have different CIOs participating, the main feedback element, which always features in the top three, is "Help us take accountability for the full business value."

Business outcomes

We talk about business values. Business outcome is probably the most clichéd word, but you can never deliver on a business outcome until you take accountability for the full lifecycle. So, the feedback is the necessity to make sure that the business outcome we promise to the customer is realized, and we take accountability for it as the first and most important reason, Dana.

And you're right, cloud is a big trend and cloud talks about exactly the same things, which is: "Let us completely make this whole process of managing the operations in the stack transparent to you, Mr. Customer."

The reality is that cloud is still nebulous. Different companies have different interpretations of cloud. Customers are still a little nervous about going into the cloud, because we're still not completely sure about quality, security, and all of those things. So, this is the first or second step you take before you get comfortable to get to the cloud.

What we're able to do here is take complete control of that complexity and make it transparent to the customer -- and in a way -- to quasi-deliver the same outcomes which a cloud can deliver. That’s the second thing: Cloud is a trend, and we're making sure that we actually address it before we get there.

The third thing, which is very interesting is that a lot of these services are also things we're providing to the cloud service providers. So, in a way, we're making sure that people who offer that cloud service are able to leverage our services to make sure that they can offer the same outcomes back to the customer. So, it’s a full lifecycle.

When we deploy a solution for a customer, which involves our technology, our software, for the most part, a service element to actually make it a reality, we will support the full solution.



Gardner: That’s an interesting point. These services providers, these hosts, these cloud providers can’t manage their margins and provide a quality service at an affordable price, if they don’t employ these same sorts of comprehensive support.

Now, if we need to change how the software and multiple implementations are managed, you as an IT support provider probably need to change as well. So what’s different now about how you are coming to market than several years ago?

Eswaran: Let me just first tell you what we're talking about today. If you look at classical customer support as part of a software organization, the support organization supports the product, and that’s why you have the complexity for the customer as we talked about.

What we're announcing and launching is enhancing and elevating that support from just being a product to actually being the entire project and the solution for the customer. This is where, when we deploy a solution for a customer, which involves our technology, our software, for the most part, a service element to actually make it a reality, we will support the full solution.

That's the principal thing now that will allow us to not just talk about business outcomes when we go through the selling lifecycle, but it will also allow us to make those business outcomes a reality by taking full accountability for it. That is at the heart of what we are announcing -- extending customer support from a product to the project and from a product to the full solution.

Gardner: Is it fair to say, Anand, that you're looking at this now from that SLA or multiple SLA aspect -- that you're sort of an über SLA manager? Does that take it to the next level?

Two dimensions

Eswaran: Absolutely. And if I walk through what HP Premier Services is, that probably will shed more light on it. As I explain HP Premier Services, there are two dimensions to it.

The first dimension is the three choice points, and the first of those is what has classically been customer support. We just call it Foundation, where customer support supports the product. You have a phone line you can call. That doesn't change. That's always been there.

The second menu item in the first dimension is what we term as Premier Response, and this menu item is where we actually take that support for the product and extend it to the full project and the full solution. This is new and this is the first level of the extension we are going to offer to the customer.

The third menu item takes it even further. We call it Premier Advisory. In addition to just supporting the product, which has always been there, or just extending it to support a solution and the project -- both of those things are reactive -- we can engage with the customer to be proactive about support.

That's proactive as in not just reacting to an issue, but preempting problems and preempting issues, based on our knowledge of all the customers and how they have deployed the solution. We can advise the customer, whether it's patches, whether it's upgrades, whether it's other issues we see, or whether it's a best practice they need to implement. We can get proactive, so we preempt issues. Those are the three choice points on the first dimension.

We make anything and everything to do with the back end -- infrastructure, upgrades, and all of that -- completely transparent to the customer.



The second dimension is a different way to look at how we're extending Premier Services for the benefit of the customer. Again, the first choice point in the second dimension is called Premier Business. We have a named account manager who will work with the customer across the entire lifecycle. This is already there right now.

The second part of the second dimension is very new, and large enterprise customers will derive a lot of value from it. It's called Premier TeamExtend. Not only we will be do the first three choice points of foundation, support for the whole solution, and proactive support, we will extend and take control for the customer of the entire operation of that solution.

At that point, you almost mimic a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, but if there are reasons a customer wouldn't want to do SaaS and wouldn't want to do managed services, but want to host it on-site and have the full solution hosted in the customer premises, we will still deploy the solution, have them realize the full benefit of it, and run their solution and operate their solution.

By virtue of that, we make anything and everything to do with the back end -- infrastructure, upgrades, and all of that -- completely transparent to the customer. All they care about is the business outcome. If it's a solution we have deployed to cut outages by 3 percent and get service levels uptime up to 99.99 percent, that's what they get.

Complete transparency

How we do it, the solutions involved, the service involved, and how we're managing it is completely transparent. The fundamental headline there is that it allows the customer to go back to 70 percent innovation and 30 percent maintenance and completely flip the ratio.

Those are the five choice points, which is what HP Premier Services is about, which starts to roll the ball up the hill and help the customer.

Gardner: Let me drill in on that Premier TeamExtend. That really sounds like a new flavor on this whole sourcing equation, even on where you get your IT value.

If I understand correctly, you are almost saying that you can get the best of the SaaS or cloud implementation, whereby you have that one interaction, that one manager. You have a cost point that you can define and appreciate. You have levels of service management that you define and put in place.

But, you don't have to take the risk of moving this off premises or even changing the architecture fundamentally. It's really changing how you manage this particular set of software assets and, therefore, you can get the best of both worlds. Or am I overstating it?

We work across HP to make this whole vision of one throat to choke, one point of accountability, and making accountability for the business outcome for the customer a reality.



Eswaran: No, you're not overstating it. In fact, the reason it works really well for us is that what you said is exactly true. Let me give you a couple of use cases where it starts to make a big difference.

Within HP, as we all know, we have Enterprise Services (ES), with outsourcing services we offer to our customers.

There are many instances in which ES has offered a software solution to the customer as part of an outsourcing solution. We've offered Premier Services to our ES team, so they can can offer that über, one throat to choke, one point of accountability solution for the customers they work with without necessarily having to say, "If you have a software problem, you probably need to go to HP Software Customer Support." We help ES take full accountability at the back-end.

We work across HP to make this whole vision of one throat to choke, one point of accountability, and making accountability for the business outcome for the customer a reality.

You said exactly the right thing, you didn’t overstate it. We can also offer the same service to all the outsourcing providers or cloud service providers we work with.

Gardner: There has to be some technical capability involved here? The last time we spoke, it was around Business Service Management 9 (BSM9), which you released last year. Is there a technical capability where you can come in and implement BSM 9, which allows you to then manage these implementations remotely and at a competitive cost, which would allow you to come back and offer something like Premier TeamExtend?

Eswaran: Absolutely. There are a couple of things. One is, there is technical capability involved. The second is that we're offering this across the entire HP Software portfolio stack. BSM 9, would be applicable, when we are talking about offering this service in the operation space of our HP Software products. But, we can also do the same thing in the applications space. We can also do the same thing for certain HP Services projects, which may not have that big product footprint.

Across the portfolio

So, this is a service that we're offering across the entire portfolio for all solutions we put in front of customers. Some of them may involve BSM, and some of them may not. People may ask what's different. "Why are you able to do it today? The customer problem you are talking about sounds pretty native. Why haven’t you done this forever?"

Dana, if you look at a software organization, the segmentation between support and services is very discrete, whether inside the company or whether it is support working with services organization outside the company, and that’s the heart of the problem.

What we're doing here is a pretty big step. You hear about "services convergence" an awful lot in the industry. People think that’s the way to go. What they mean by services convergence is that all the services you need across the customer lifecycle merges to become one, and that’s what we are doing here.

We're merging what was customer support, which is a call center, and that’s why they can't take accountability for a solution. They are good at diagnostics, but they're not good at full-fledged solutions. They're merging that organization.

What that organization brings in is scale, infrastructure, and absolute global data center coverage. We're merging that with the Professional Services (PS) organization. When the rubber hits the road, PS is the organization or the people who deploy these solutions.

In my view, and in HP Software’s view, this is a fairly groundbreaking solution.



And by virtue of a very, very extensive PS team within HP Software, we operate in 80 or 90 countries. We have coverage worldwide. By merging those two, you get the best of both worlds, because you get scale, coverage, infrastructure, capability. That's how we're able to provide the service where we take accountability for this whole solution.

Gardner: So, whereas I as an IT customer would have to manage different aspects of support, you're going to bring that together on your end and allow me to purchase those in a more integrated and comprehensive fashion.

What I really like about it too is that it allows me to have flexibility in how I would acquire and invest in these types of services. I can do it at a fairly gradual pace and/or I can isolate specific applications and say, "Let's push those out into this more comprehensive support, because eventually I might want to move to a cloud model or a SaaS model." It seems that it gives me quite a bit more as an architecture decision process, and more to work with as a consumer.

Eswaran: Absolutely. In my view, and in HP Software’s view, this is a fairly groundbreaking solution. If I were to characterize everything we talked about in three words, the first would be simplify. The second would be proactive -- how can we be proactive, versus reacting to issues. And, how can we, still under the construct of the first two, offer the customers choice.

Customers are at different points of maturity, of the appetite they have for risk, and the appetite they have for the capabilities that they bring to the table. They are at different points in the trajectory across a variety of those different parameters, and we're offering choice to them.

Customer choice

We're not just giving them one thing, which they're pretty much forced to take, but if it's a very mature customer, with extensive capability on all the products and IT strategies that they're putting into place, they don’t need to go to TeamExtend. They can just maybe take a Foundation with just the first bit of HP Premier Services, which is Premier Response. That’s all they need to take.

If there is an enterprise that is so focused on competitive differentiation in the marketplace and they don't want to worry about maintaining the solutions, then they could absolutely go to Premier TeamExtend, which offers them the best of all worlds.

Choice is a very big deal for us, so that customers can actually make the decision and we can recommend to them what they should be doing.

Gardner: I like the idea of being able to dip your toe in the water and try some things out. If they work, pursue them, and then examine the different hosting options you might have further out. A lot of companies seem to be putting the cart in front of the horse.

They're saying, "We're going to go to the sourcing options like cloud, SaaS or hybrid, but we really haven’t figured out how we would manage the service and support." It seems as if you are, in a sense, encouraging them to do that first, and then think about the sourcing option.

Choice is a very big deal for us, so that customers can actually make the decision and we can recommend to them what they should be doing.



Eswaran: Absolutely.

Gardner: This sounds great in theory, but what happens in practice? Do you have any examples of where you have done this -- whether you can tell me who they are or what happened in a general sense? What are some of the outcomes when you do this based on your suggestions across these different four levels?

Eswaran: We're still working on being able to release customer names, but let me walk you through the use cases, so we understand kind of what we are talking about here.

We're working with a large organization in the U.S., where the biggest issue the customer had was the need to cut outages in their data centers by 40 percent. They were struggling on that count.

If you look at the classical model, you sell your product, BSM, operations, orchestration, SA. Essentially, what you're doing there is selling them a product. You're using a services organization to deploy those products and then you turn it back to support.

Now, we can talk about how we do this, but when the customer’s only need was to cut outages by 40 percent, no one organization can take accountability for that final outcome. We can put a solution that gets them there, but eventually they are stuck holding the bag and hoping that this solution will actually do that. If there's a problem, they basically have to figure out who they need to go to, to make sure the problem goes away.

Limited launch

We committed to them that we would put a solution in place which would cut their outages by 40 percent, because we've been in limited launch mode for the last nine months on HP Premier Services.

We were able to deploy the solution, the entire operation stack, across that IT organization. We were able to now hold ourselves, HP Software, accountable for what we committed to them. Sure enough, at this point in time, the customer’s business outcomes are completely and fully realized.

What you see as a subtext to this is that it’s not just the cost savings that we will enable to the different customers because of what we do. It's not just flipping the ratio from operations to innovation. Those are huge things, but the key is that we're able to commit and guarantee service levels. We're able to commit and guarantee business outcomes. That’s not what we were able to do in the past.

We work with a large financial services organization, where we talked about cutting their defect levels in half across the entire stack, by virtue of a test automation solution we are putting in place.

Again, because of what we are doing here, we actually made that a possibility, because we now manage and take control of the full lifecycle for the customer. I think the initial math was that the defect level they had was close to 7 percent or 6.5 percent, which was causing them a spend of $125 million. So, cutting that in half is a huge cost saving for the customer.

That is the kind of discussions we're able to engage in with our customers today, guarantee a business outcome, and follow through, because we're in control of the full customer lifecycle.



That is the kind of discussions we're able to engage in with our customers today, guarantee a business outcome, and follow through, because we're in control of the full customer lifecycle.

Gardner: How would I know if I am in a right position or a good position to start availing myself of these types of services? Are there any telltale signs inside an organization, whether it’s from a cost structure, whether it’s from availability and performance perspective, whether it’s from a reluctance of IT to bring on more or new technology or solutions?

Are there sort of some telltale signs that would indicate whether moving towards this more comprehensive service and support approach would be the right thing, the right fit, the right timing?

Eswaran: Absolutely. If you feel you're bouncing around between different organizations, as you try to get control of your IT infrastructure, whether if you work with an external SI and you do not feel that there is enough in sync happening between support and an external SI and you feel frustrated about it, this falls right in the sweet spot.

If you feel that you need to start moving away from just projects to business outcome based solutions you need to deploy in your IT organization, this falls right in the sweet spot for it.

If you feel that you want to spend less of your time maintaining solutions and more of your time thinking about the core business your company is in and making sure that your innovation is able to capture a bigger market share and bigger business benefits for the company you work for, and you want some organization to take accountability for the operations and maintenance of the stack you have, this falls right in the sweet spot for it.

Smaller companies

The last thing, interestingly enough, is that we see a little bit of uptake from even smaller and medium-sized companies, where they do not have enough people, and they do not want to worry about maintenance of the stack based on the capability or the experience of the people they have on these different solutions -- whether it's operations, whether it's applications, whether it is security across the entire HP software stack. So, if you're on any of those four or five different use cases, this falls right in the sweet spot for all of them.

Gardner: What about availability? When will these services be available? Where can we learn more about them? How should an organization engage? Who do they talk to? Is this a software discussion, a services discussion, a help desk discussion? How do you learn more, and when are these available?

Eswaran: We've been in limited launch mode since June of last year. We wanted to make sure that we engage with a limited set of customers, make sure this really works, work out all the logistics, before we actually do a full public general availability launch. So, it is effective immediately.

From an engagement standpoint, just work with the regular software team members or HP team members you work with. This is a service within HP. It is provided by HP Software Services, but your method of engagement should just be with the regular HP people you work with.

The whole purpose of this is to take complexity away. So work with whoever you work with. They have the ability to dip into HP and avail this service.

We wanted to make sure that we engage with a limited set of customers, make sure this really works, work out all the logistics, before we actually do a full public general availability launch.



If it is software, that's very simple, because we provide that service. If it is HP Enterprise Services (ES), work with them, because we provide the service to ES as well. So, work with the usual HP counterparts or point of contact you have, and they will make sure this service is available for you.

Gardner: And I imagine if you wanted to just do a quick search you could go to HP Premier Services online on your web search and you will probably find a lot of information there.

Eswaran: You should be able to find a lot of information there. We're publicly announcing this on March 8, and we'll have a lot more detail to share then.

Go down to HP Software component of the HP website and you should be able to find datasheets and all of that, and then work with your regular HP point of contact. They will be able to get you any other information you need.

Gardner: Great. We've been discussing about how new models are coming together for IT support services and why they are necessary to provide more of a single point of accountability when multiple software implementation is involved. And as we have discussed this more, I've learned that this is really an opportunity to create stepping stones to future models, a bit more of an architected approach to service with an integrated support characteristic. That to me is pretty exciting.

So I want to thank our guest. We've been here with Anand Eswaran, Vice President of Professional Services for HP Software. Thanks so much, Anand.

Eswaran: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: And this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. You've been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast. 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.

Transcript of a sponsored podcast on HP's latest integrated IT support services, the HP Software Premier program. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.

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