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Hi Duncan. Welcome to HP Discover 2012.
Please introduce yourself to our viewers.
You bet. I'm Duncan Campbell. And I'm the
VP of Marketing for the Converged
Infrastructure Solutions here. And I'm very
excited to be able to share with you what
we're starting to get here in terms of the
buzz at HP Discover in Frankfurt. We have
over 9,000 customers and partners. We're
delighted to share with you what we're
hearing here today.
So Duncan, speaking of converged
infrastructure tell us a little bit about the
background? What are some of the big trends
driving converged infrastructure today?
You bet. So what we're hearing from a lot of
our customers, from a business standpoint,
what they're struggling with today, certainly
one of the top key items we're hearing about
is about speed. They're hearing about how
they need to keep up with the pace of
business. And when you just understand what's 0:00:56.500,0:00:58.900 happening in the market today, that's really
coming out as number one. Number two though
is agility. So speed without agility to me is
just--it doesn't make sense. You go really
fast in your car but if you can't move around
traffic, boom, you go right into a wall. So
agility is the second one. How you can
actually adjust to your business conditions
and climate. And the third, of course is just
having the right financial management, having
the right type of alignment with KPIs,
customer SLAs is very important. Certainly
the converged infrastructure handles all
three of those business requirements just in
a very strong fashion.
So Duncan, we're hearing a lot more from
analysts about convergence as an
inevitability for the next decade. And more
and more customers are getting excited. So if
you were to give advice to a CIO who is
thinking about going the converge direction
today, what would that be?
Yes. You bet. So what we're clearly hearing
right now is you almost have a nexus or you
have big shifts, big changes, big themes that
are happening in the market today. Those are
big data, cloud, mobility, to mention a few.
Now one of the things that is really a
requirement at the end of the day is having
a strong foundation. And that foundation
really needs to be of a modern architecture.
And a modern architecture that has three
fundamental type of components to it. One of
course is that it's integrated by design. So
not just pieces attached, bolted together,
but fundamentally pieces of the
infrastructure, that are the server, the
storage, the networking, and very importantly
the integrated management all integrated by
design into a shared services infrastructure.
So that's number one. The other piece of
advice besides having that modern
architecture is it has to be open. So you
can't really dictate to your customers, we
don't feel, HP does not feel we should be
dictating to customers, closing this down, so
the approach of taking a open standards-
based approach is fundamental. So we are
actually open in terms of how we actually
work with different operating systems,
different hypervisors, different ISPs, and
that is absolutely essential to our approach
and is the second piece of advice that I
would give to CIOs. I think the third key
piece is you want to work with a vendor that
has proven experience in this area especially
where you look--where we are today. We have
customers here all the way from Kazakhstan,
of course from Germany, Western Europe,
Eastern Europe, in fact from other regions as
well. So I think those are the three
fundamental things to really handle these
big trends that we're seeing in the market
whether it's cloud, big data, mobility, that
is exactly how those three pieces of advice
would tailor in, in terms of a modern
architecture, number two, of being very open
and number three, having--working with a
vendor that has proven experience that
really can work with your--work with our
customers today to make them successful.
So Duncan, HP announced a converged
infrastructure strategy three years ago and
you've made great headways in a lot of
product areas. But as Dave Packard used to
say, to remain static is to lose ground. We
know that HP doesn't want to stay static
in this area so what are some of the big
exciting things we can look forward to in the
coming years?
You bet. So where converged infrastructure is
today, number one, really shows a leading
position. Why? Because we actually invented
the category three years ago. And we've been
busy really providing additional intellectual
property in all the key areas that are part
of the converged infrastructure whether it's
in storage, where we're hearing some
phenomenal announcements here today at
Discover as well as with servers where we've
invented new categories as well as with
networking, we have end to end capability in
integrated management. But it's not just
about the infrastructure that really shows how
we're leading the market. The fact is where
it's going is more how the infrastructure
needs to tie to the application. So with that
recognition we're not standing still. We have
these new full portfolio of converged
systems that allow our customers to take
the infrastructure all the way up to the
application. Now in some of the cases since
we have such a broad portfolio here, we can
actually go all the way up to the application
with our app systems, with some of these
new hot areas around Hadoop and HANA but
we also have our cloud systems, okay, where
we can stand up new applications and services
or with our vert systems which is where a lot
of customers are today in terms of solving
key virtualization problems, not just for the
server but the server virtualization, to the
storage, to the client, and even virtual data
centers. So as you can see today we are not
at all standing still. We're taking, breaking
new grounds, providing explicit benefits that
our customers can actually put into action
today to solve their real world business
problems.
Let's talk a little about software defined.
That's a buzz word we're hearing a lot this
year and I know HP announced earlier this
year a software defined network offering.
Where does software defined sit in the world
of converged infrastructure?
It's really interesting what's happening in
the market today. HP was first out in terms
of creating a new software defined networking
product which is really interesting of how to
connect users to applications much, much
quicker, much faster than ever before. It's
really about virtualizing that network,
abstracting the control information from the
data. But don't stop there. Think about how
that applies to the other areas of the
converged infrastructure. And in fact you see
that today in storage with our stored virtual
capability. A similar type of capability, and
of course with our moon shot of how we're
starting to integrate and in fact architect
our moon shot servers to work with
applications. So you can see from a
directional standpoint, this is going to be a
very interesting area, one that the converged
infrastructure fits extremely tightly, very
intuitively with. And I would say at this
point that this is going to represent some
additional bold type of thinking and
breakthroughs coming forward here in the
near future.