HP Enterprise Services (newly separated from Enterprise software) recently ran its European event for analysts and influencers in London. Heading up Enterprise Services in EMEA is Mike Nefkens, ex-EDS, who is possibly slightly too young to yet head up ES globally (a post currently vacant) but who has done a good job over the past couple of years in stabilising the Enterprise Services business in EMEA after the acquisition of EDS. He suggested that it would take the company another 12 to 18 months to gain full health as a services business, but was justifiably proud of noting that his operation can claim the highest total contract value won in its last quarter of any provider in any previous quarter in EMEA.
So, if you are a buyer of IT services you can take comfort from the fact that HP is happier and healthier than it was a couple of years ago. But aside from that, what should you understand about today’s HP Enterprise Services business? Basically HP wants to convince you that it is both a safe pair of hands and also an innovative service provider. There is nothing intrinsically differentiating about that but what is of interest, I think, is the company’s chosen areas of focus for engagement.
One of these is the development and management of the hybrid delivery environment, i.e.: provision of a mixed model capability of on-premise or hosted client-server implementations and private and public Cloud delivery models. This will increasingly be a large challenge for organisational IT over the next 5 to 7 years. As HP’s Jay Keyse, world-wide data centre services chief strategist, puts it, “it’s a hybrid delivery world” for CIOs as they work to bridge the legacy and as-a-Service worlds that can enable their organisations to flourish. Keyse makes the point that enterprises will evolve to Cloud at different speeds, but I’m confident she would agree that actually life is more complicated and different parts of each enterprise may well also need to evolve at different speeds.
Behind the scenes HP has been preparing to meet this hybrid computing requirement by spending a couple of years creating a single Cloud Functional Reference Architecture which is now used by ALL HP divisions so that the company can operate effectively to supply and deliver the appropriate “as-a-Service” solutions as demanded by the customer. In this way the supplier can work with enterprise customers to reserve capacity to meet base requirements for an outsourcing contract, and then the customer can use task orders to scale up and down between the base infrastructure requirements and the peak requirements. The capacity to meet the peak requirements will be carried via a leveraged pool of compute power across clients, which will enable HP to meet scalable volume requests within hours. This will give existing outsourcing customers the ability to burst out to HP Enterprise Cloud Services (ECS) compute, while being able to specify country location of the data centre.
To date the only ECS capable data centres are in the US and the UK, but over the coming year these will be joined by HP data centres in France, Spain, Germany, The Netherlands, Italy, India and Australia. By 2012 HP says it will also have migrated its utility services into one architectural resourcing and delivery capability with its Cloud services that customers can access via their service catalogues from the HP Enterprise Cloud Services Portal.
By doing all this HP is investing in a belief that Infrastructure as-a-Service will ultimately become the standard option for outsourcing contracts, but as Nefkens says, “we currently need to focus on getting traditional contracts right or there is no point in us investing in emerging services.” Hybrid delivery is rapidly becoming the new reality and at the infrastructure level HP is developing a compelling enterprise-grade Cloud capability to support CIOs looking to add new Cloud delivery models to their existing infrastructure capabilities.
Dr Katy Ring is Principal Analyst at K2 Advisory. More information on K2 and its CIO-focused research and events can be found here.
