Speaking during a visit to South Africa this week, David Chalmers, Chief Technologist for HP's Enterprise Group in EMEA, noted that issues such as availability, speed and power consumption have become as important as those of managing big data, mobility and cloud.
"Availability needs far greater focus now, as enterprises everywhere depend on their IT systems for business survival," says Chalmers. "So while 99% uptime may once have sounded reasonable, it now translates into the possibility that an enterprise could be offline for over 10 working days a year. This is not acceptable, because now, IT isn't just something within the enterprise - IT is the enterprise."
Chalmers cites examples of Twitter storms that erupted in the UK within minutes of recent nationwide ATM outages. "The IT department may be able to get the system back up in 60 minutes, but 60 minutes is too late in a world where everyone is online and connected via social media," he says.
"This means that it is now crucial to have systems that work, all the time," he says.
Chalmers says another major change is the enterprise's need for speed. "IT needs to support this by doing things in minutes and hours, not the days, weeks and months of the past," he says. He points out that AOL took years to achieve a million subscribers some years ago, while recently, mobile game Draw Something achieved a million users in under nine days. "The pace of business has increased dramatically, so that now enterprises might actually fail as a result of their own success, if their systems cannot cope with that success," Chalmers says.
In addition, power consumption is becoming a massive concern to IT departments - not just due to the spiralling costs of power, but also because limits in power availability constrain the enterprise's ability to grow. If more power is not available to enable the enterprise to grow its systems in line with business needs, the only alternative is to reduce the power consumption of the enterprise systems, he points out.
HP, traditionally an innovator with a clear view of future enterprise IT needs, has invested heavily in R&D to bring to market solutions to address these growing needs, says Chalmers. "HP does the full R&D - not just the 'D' as many others do. Having predicted the growing need for higher availability, greater systems speed and reduced power consumption, HP has made acquisitions and brought to market solutions designed to meet these needs." These include the HP Moonshot portfolio with the software defined data centre, which allows for significantly reduced power consumption, with breakthrough efficiency and scale. HP convergence occurs at the point of design - not the point of delivery - to support changing enterprise IT needs. "We even address 'boring' things like power supplies, to ensure that every component of the network supports efficiency, speed and lower power consumption," says Chalmers.
HP's innovations to meet changing business demands, and the company's views on the future of computing, will come under discussion at the upcoming HP World South Africa 2014 conference and exhibition, to be held at the Sandton Convention Centre on 13 May.
The event, which brings to South Africa the most important insights from the global HP Discover events, is set to prepare local business and IT executives to meet the challenges facing them as they head toward the 2020 IT environment. Up to 1 000 C-level decision-makers at the event will get in-depth analysis and practical advice on key trends and challenges, including the reinventing of the cloud, how to fight back against cyber criminals, the role of wearables in Internet of Things, and how connected intelligence can streamline business and improve profitability.
For more information on HP World South Africa 2014, and to reserve a place at this key event, click here.
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For information on Moonshot, go to http://www.hp.com/go/moonshot
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