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Things have changed - HP


Hamburg, 05 Jan 2010

Anyone who wants to know when things will get back to the way they were is in for a rude shock, says Jan Zadak, senior VP for enterprise business sales at HP EMEA.

He was speaking in Hamburg, Germany, at HP's annual Software Universe Conference, during the launch of the company's new cloud offerings aimed at service providers and existing users of HP's cloud services.

"Sometimes I still hear the question: 'When will things get back to where they were?'," said Zadak. "And my reply is always: 'I don't think it's going to get back to the way it was - ever'. The world has changed, the world has transformed and I am of the opinion that we need to look at how we position the portfolio and the IT assets so that we can drive differentiation in this transformed world.

“We talk to thousands of executives around the world. Ninety-two percent of those surveyed said the business climate is still unpredictable. Eighty-four percent said innovation is going to be core to our capability. Eighty percent said they need a more flexible approach on both the business and technology side.

"The efficiency of an organisation is very often determined by how flexibly it can manage its application portfolio. I spoke to a CIO in Germany recently and he said he had 3 000 applications and more than 1 500 of those were used by less than 15 people. That's not a very agile or flexible portfolio. Application transformation is going to be core to being able to build an agile infrastructure in the future."

Zadak said, although times were still turbulent, HP was in a good position to leverage both its recent acquisition of EDS and its global scale as a provider of software and services.

"2009 has been an interesting year, the most interesting since I started in IT 17 years ago. We are well into the plan to integrate EDS into our business and IT continues to give us tremendous leverage as we go through 2009. Software and solutions has been core drivers of the financial performance of the company - it is the most profitable business in HP, which is a great achievement. It is the sixth largest software company in the world."

Despite the pessimism, HP itself saw a bump in Q4, according to Steen Lomholt-Thomsen, VP and GM of Software and Solutions.

"As we exited Q4 we saw a significant surge in our business," he said. "From Q3 to Q4 we saw an increase in what we define as big deals that really show that customers believe in the breadth and our core value proposition to solve the problems that they have. As we head into 2010, our portfolio will allow us to access a market that is worth $90 billion - eight times bigger than the market we were able to address five or six years ago."

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