Why HP is different from IBM
Published: 31 Mar 2008 16:09 BST
...is a cost reduction for our customer and it is also good environmentally and we believe that is one of the key areas of focus for most businesses. So we invented some technology called Dynamic Smart Cooling. It can reduce the power consumption by 40 percent. We implemented it in HP in our new datacentres, our three pairs of datacentres, and we are going to reduce it by about 60 percent of our energy consumption.
That is just a huge effect and we think it is one of those examples that has both a cost benefit as well as the environmental benefit. That is a big focus for use and you will see us continue to focus on what we can do to reduce the power and cooling requirements in datacentres.
But do you pass the cost onto the customer?
Typically our revenue comes from either a consulting engagement to set up the whole cooling or some of the technology we can sell into the environment and then the customers catches the cost savings themselves. So they have to measure the return they make on the investment in services and technology but the ongoing saving is theirs.
Do you see there is political aspect as the datacentre is targeted for being wasteful of energy?
Well, that is true, but it creates lots of opportunities for us! [Laughs] Seriously, I think a lot of companies are worried because they have reached a constraint where they can't bring any more power into their datacentre and they need to do something to transform it. So it is high on the agenda of most CIOs.
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How big is your software business?
It is over $2bn [£1bn].
You developed software for helping customers implement SAP and Microsoft Exchange straight out of the box and tailored for different markets. What is the thinking behind these products?
Many companies don't want to take the time or the effort to build the next-generation datacentre for themselves and what they would love to do is almost the equivalent of plugging in the wall and having service delivered to them. Except that with the wireless capabilities we have today, you wouldn't even have to plug it into the wall.
So what they are really interested in is how can they use the application and do it in such a way that they don't even have to make any capital investment [and can] pretty much just turn it on immediately. So for those companies who are willing to pretty well, straight-up use an application, a standard version of it, these are two good offerings for them.
Originally we thought this was going to be mainly attractive to small and medium-sized customers, but what we also see is a single business unit, or perhaps a single geographic location [may be interested]. Or perhaps a large enterprise customer will be willing.
Do you see the company doing this with others, other than SAP and Microsoft?
That's our intention. Start with these two and see how it goes. The condition of this kind of service is how willing the users are to have a standard application package. And we know there are SAP and certainly Exchange customers who are very happy with the standard app.
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