Economic uncertainty forces businesses to face myriad competing demands. They need to meet the present needs of the organisation, while - at the same time - preparing for the future.
They need to lower costs on the one side, while delivering new services and improving quality on the other, said Ann Livermore, executive VP of HP enterprise business, during her keynote address at Oracle OpenWorld, in San Francisco, yesterday.
This is a complex task, she noted, as CIOs are handling a rigid infrastructure, application complexity and an explosion of information. Solving these problems needs to happen in order to unleash the full potential of a business.
According to her, HP and Oracle can help with this. “The two companies have been working together for over two decades, to assist their joint customers to use IT to drive growth. Over 40% of Oracle databases are deployed on HP infrastructure. HP has 3 400 application professionals worldwide supporting more than a million Oracle users, and HP is one of Oracle's largest partners, with deep experience in deploying Oracle solutions. The addition of EDS has added even more of these professionals.”
Livermore cited IT sprawl as one of the biggest sources of complexity and inefficiency in companies today. Seventy percent of IT budget is spent on operations, regardless of whether the environment is virtualised or physical.
“Resources are tied up in technology silos, each focused on a particular application or line of business. These silos have proliferated as companies have made project-based IT purchases to keep pace with business growth.”
“A converged infrastructure is a set of standards-based components that can be assembled as needed to deal with a specific workload, and then be disassembled and reassembled to handle something completely different.
“The architecture behind a converged infrastructure is everything from an operating environment that enables shared-service management, to virtual resource pools that integrate compute, memory, storage and network resources.”
Livermore said CIOs are concurrently putting a high priority on modernising applications and transformation. “Legacy applications, which are usually central to the business, are costly to maintain, and resist the kind of evolution necessary to keep pace with rapidly changing business requirements.”
IT companies and businesses are also dealing with an explosion of information, which is often hard to find and expensive to manage. Organisations that use business intelligence, information management and archiving solutions to harness this information, will have a competitive advantage.
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