Sam Routledge's Blog

It’s nearly a week since I got back from HP’s Technology at Work event, in Frankfurt, and I have just about caught up, so I thought it was time to summarise my experience. First out, I very much enjoyed it – the organisation was very slick, Frankfurt was friendly and the content was superb. I feel less guilty now that HP have cancelled their tablet plans (or at least delayed them pending the integration of Palm) for my use of an iPad throughout the event…

My first comment would be that getting involved in the social media scene at events like this is a good idea. It made me feel really engaged with the event to be following #HPTAW and tweeting with folks like @StorageGuy and @JezatHP (follow both of these guys for good insider info on HP Storage and Networking respectively). It’s a really useful back-channel to comment on what is going on and point people in the direction of stuff that is interesting. Needless to say I was delighted to end up as Mayor of HP Technology at Work on Foursquare…

Now on with the technology industry… My primary takeaway was the emphasis from Gartner (who were out in force) on a simple statistic: that in their research, 70% of IT budget is spent on ‘keeping the lights on’, and only 30% spent on innovation – finding technology solutions to move the business forwards. That’s pretty scary, and I would welcome feedback from our customers as to whether that’s common experience. It feels about right to me. Almost every keynote referred back to this statistic, and HP are focusing their efforts on remedying the situation. A lot of the conversations were around reducing cost: power and cooling, management, etc. However, an interesting point was that CIOs with responsibility for the power bills refresh infrastructure more often, deriving ROI from this refresh – and in the process giving their organisation access to the latest technology, making the business more agile.

I’m sure we all hope we are on the way out of recession. Certainly the feedback from Gartner was that organisations are investing. In fact, the focus appears to be moving away from out-and-out cost, although budget growth will remain low or nonexistent. The focus is on balancing value with risk and innovation – the goal is to enable the business to be flexible and adapt to change. The legacy of the economic situation will leave organisations in a state of flux – M&A, emerging markets, volatility and a need to advance and retract into areas will mean that IT must be able to react to and enable this constant change. No wonder virtualisation, cloud and Web 2.0 are the top three technologies on CIOs’ watch-lists. HP are working hard on the concept of ‘converged infrastructure’ (separate post to follow) to provide a cohesive platform from which to deliver services to meet the needs of your organisation.

End-user computing was another area, and one which has interested me for some time. The story echoed my post on Next Generation Desktops, but suffice it to say that the computing environment of tomorrow will be a little different. Virtualisation of the desktop in its various forms will become commonplace, and management by separation of the various layers (hardware, OS, apps, profile etc) will be the norm. At the same time, IT departments will need to get used to delivering mobile, lightweight apps to laptops, netbooks, smartphones and (dare I say it) the iPad.

Lastly, there was a fair amount on the networking front. HP contest that the acquisition of 3COM gives them an end-to-end networking portfolio, from the core to the edge, including security, for the first time. Networking is key to the Converged Infrastructure message, so keep an eye on this (we will announce an event soon). There was a lot of talk about unified communications, in particular integration of Microsoft Exchange and OCS with Procurve and Proliant.

Whilst I don’t think I recall Cisco being mentioned by name throughout the entire event, it’s fairly evident that they have a fight on their hands here!