Frank van Rees has taken up the reins at HP SA, and been tasked with growing the business locally; particularly in the next-generation converged infrastructure space.
Van Rees was appointed MD and enterprise business lead of HP SA in December last year. His first tasks will be to stabilise the organisation, improve the working relationships with the channel partners operating in the country, and to drive HP's cloud computing and sustainability strategy.
Van Rees joined HP in 2005 as HP services director for the Netherlands and was then appointed sales lead for the enterprise business in the Netherlands. Van Rees took over from Gois Fouche, who was the MD of HP SA on an interim basis. Fouche is now the financial controller for HP SA. Prior to Fouche, Oliver Fortuin held the position of MD.
Van Rees says: “It's clear from the management changes we've had in the past that we can now build an executive relationship with our channel partners. Last year had been a difficult year because of the recession, coupled with the fact that it's a highly competitive market. However, HP is well positioned for growth in 2010. We will invest more in the channel.”
Deals by the dozen
HP is bullish about making mergers and acquisitions this year, and in January entered into a $250 million collaboration with Microsoft to invest in research and development.
Van Rees adds: “HP's merger with Microsoft means we can deliver on the integrated stack of applications more easily for our customers. The future for HP is to utilise all the strengths of the acquisitions and mergers in our portfolio to help our customers grow their businesses.”
Another planned HP deal is its $2.7 billion acquisition of 3Com, a provider of networking switching, routing and security solutions. The deal will see HP acquire 3Com for $7.90 per share and is expected to take on a market dominated by Cisco.
According to Van Rees, the 3Com acquisition, which is expected to be finalised in coming months, will speed-up HP's converged infrastructure strategy. HP's next-generation data centre strategy is built on the convergence of servers, storage, networking and management services.
“The 3Com acquisition will change the networking industry quite significantly. We are currently number two in the networking market, but with the merger, we will have a bigger impact on the market against Cisco and it will be compelling for our customers as they will have more choice,” says Van Rees.
“The deal will be a good fit with HP ProCurve, meaning HP will have the building blocks to build state-of-the-art data centres complete with converged networking.”
Reduce and simplify
According to Van Rees, HP is making significant investments in the research and development of energy-efficient technology for the data centre. He explains that most companies spend around 70% of their budget on IT operations and only 30% on innovation. In the past two years, HP started a strategy to improve IT efficiency by consolidating and virtualising its infrastructure.
“HP was spending 4% of its $120 billion revenue on managing its in-house IT, and by consolidating data centres, by moving from 85 data centres to three twin data centres, and moving from 5 800 applications to 1 500 applications, the company achieved huge cost savings. We believe that as a global IT company, we can come up with smarter, cost-effective, innovative solutions for our customers to improve energy efficiency.”
Van Rees says following Eskom's electricity tariff hikes, energy consumption will become a priority for companies. He notes that 80% of HP's customers are looking at ways of reducing their energy consumption. “In three years' time, there won't be enough space and energy to facilitate large data centres, so we have to do something now.
“HP has set itself the goal to reduce energy consumption by 25% of the level it had in 2005.” Van Rees says the company has developed dynamic smart cooling technology that identifies electricity hotspots in the data centre. HP's blade servers working at 20% of their capacity can be virtualised to one server working at 80% of capacity to save energy.
Converged devices
HP has also revealed interest in the tablet market, with the announcement of the HP Slate based on Windows 7. This will be a direct rival to the Apple iPad, which sold 300 000 devices on the first day of its release.
“The whole market is converging and HP sees this as a big market for tablets; however, tablets will become more relevant in certain industries than others.”
The HP Slate will offer storage capacity of 32GB and 64GB and will support WiFi and 3G cellular networks.
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