Marking another move in its expansive plan to penetrate, support and boost the enterprise businesses of sub-Saharan Africa, Hewlett-Packard today launched an initiative to service and support the IT infrastructures of its Mauritian customers.
The move is viewed as highly strategic from a development standpoint - both for HP`s business in sub-Saharan Africa and the Mauritian business community. And it`s a move that Peter Testen, vice-president and general manager of Enterprise Computing Sales of HP EMEA, believes will help build a foundation for the island`s expanding IT future.
"Initially we will focus on supporting our local customers` existing infrastructures and increasing market awareness of our new business-to-business and business-to-consumer enterprise computing solutions," he explains.
The service operation has been designed such that it can support not only HP`s desktop products such as printers and workstations, but also its broadscale enterprise infrastructures.
"Our strategic plan is to then propagate the message of Internet-centric computing even further. This will involve bringing our enterprise servers and storage to market - a vital foundation for delivering on our E-services strategy," says Testen.
As a deliverable solution and strategy E-services underpins the vast majority of HP`s activities - including expansion into Mauritius and, indeed, the rest of the region. It runs as a thread through all of HP`s Internet-based solutions. And it`s a direction that HP is confident Mauritian customers will embrace and share.
"With the foundations of e-business and e-commerce already in place we believe businesses and consumers in Mauritius are ready to extract full value from the Internet with E-services," asserts Testen.
"Companies are now looking for ways to extend their reach beyond Web sites and Internet storefronts - and E-services offers new avenues to reach customers, increase revenues and to manage IT resources."
HP defines an E-service as 'any asset that is made available via the Net to either drive new revenue streams and/or create new business efficiencies.` They can be applications, computing resources, services, processes or simply information.
"Simply put E-services conduct a transaction, complete a task or solve a problem. They can be used by people, applications or businesses, or Internet-related devices like a cell phone or a palmtop PC," says Testen.
Several key elements comprise E-services, each interdependent and therefore critical to the overall success of the strategy.
e"speak - the technology platform that HP has developed according to open standards which acts as the foundation for E-services. Using e"speak it will be possible for E-services to spontaneously interact with each other over the Internet to complete the task at hand without user intervention;
L-Class and N-Class - the Unix and Windows NT server platforms that HP released last year which underpin the delivery of E-services. High speed, high capacity and high reliability are key to the strategy, and these facets are all embodied by the low-end (L-Class) and mid-range (N-Class) server offerings;
'apps-on-tap` - business applications that are delivered as pay-as-you-go services across the Internet. The intention is to allow companies to focus on building and deploying the applications that are uniquely strategic to their business; virtually everything else would be 'rented` as an 'app-on-tap`;
next-generation portals - Web sites that offer complementary third party services to specific industries or companies. For example, a bank could offer bill payment, tax preparation and accounting E-services via the site, in addition to standard customer bank account information. Or different services related to a user action (such as booking travel, an airline ticket, a hotel or a rental car) could be interconnected from a unified portal; a dynamically brokered e-services marketplace - the emergence of a situation, built around e"speak, where requests for services are automatically brokered, bid and transacted on the Internet on the requestor`s behalf.
If all goes according to the HP plan, E-services will eventually span all industries. "We expect to see business-to-business E-services such as billing, automated supply chain management, procurement and modular ERP [enterprise resource planning] taking off in sub-Saharan Africa and around the world," says Testen.
Share
