HP pushes IT as enabler of biz success

SINGAPORE--With current infrastructure getting old and outdated, IT managers see the need to upgrade to new technology but many face impediments to do so, according to a survey conducted by Hewlett-Packard.

These IT professionals said they recognize the need for change and 73 percent of respondents believed technology was the key to business and government innovation, the study revealed. Some 76 percent indicated the need for technology to be embedded into services for businesses to be successful, the survey found.

The global survey, which polled 560 senior IT executives in 17 countries including five in the Asia-Pacific region, also unveiled that 22 percent of their organization's workloads were on mainframes and almost 20 percent were designated to be moved off these systems.

Nearly half of the respondents said they experienced impediments to change or improve customer service due to security constraints.

Speaking at a media briefing here Tuesday, Kelly Tan, vice president and managing director of HP Singapore, said security remains a top concern for enterprises as attacks often occur on "what ifs" hypothetical situations, resulting in unwanted consequences such as money-losing downtime and bad publicity. 

Responding to queries on challenges enterprises face, Tan explained that legacy systems remain the biggest roadblock to upgrading of modern technology as well as "IT sprawl", where managers typically have to deal with multiple vendors which is a time-consuming and exhausting effort.

However, IT executives do acknowledge that for their businesses to remain competitive, technology has to be an enabler that is built into the workflow, something which allows them to make better informed decisions and craft appropriate strategies, she noted.

With this mind, she said HP believes its new set of integrated offerings have the ability to help enterprises embrace IT challenges in a convenient and cost-effective manner. The IT vendor's "Instant On Enterprise" strategy brings together products and services such as HP's converged infrastructure announced last month, as well as application transformation, enterprise security, information optimization and hybrid delivery.

To better enable enterprises to adopt cloud services, the vendor is also offering enterprises the flexibility of working with traditional, private and public clouds that best suit their operation model, Tan said.

Marketed under the "Hybrid Delivery" brand, she said HP consultants will advise clients based on their organization's workloads and introduce a suitable service delivery model.

She explained that many IT managers in Singapore are keen to get on the cloud as it is "the hot thing" in the technology realm at the moment. "There's been a lot of interest in this field and executives have been urging us to launch our cloud offerings quickly," Tan said.

She said enterprises still running on legacy systems were looking to the cloud as a way to "leapfrog" their transition to newer technology. As a sign of their eagerness to transform, she revealed that many HP clients had approached the vendor for a headstart.

"Many customers say they want change, but they don't know how," Tan said. "They're asking what we can do for them."

She added that in today's increasingly connected world, CIOs no longer just manage IT infrastructure, they are also tasked to provide decision-making information to CEOs. Therefore, systems that are able to provide business information and> analytics will be crucial driving forces in the near future, she noted.