The success or failure of a business hinges on how well it understands the importance of IT, and HP wants to do it all.
That's according to Ann Livermore, executive vice president of HP. At the LinuxWorld conference on Wednesday, Livermore outlined how the company envisions the next-generation data centre, which has been on the lips of IT executives for several years. The Linux community will continue to be important as more businesses embrace the concept, she told the audience gathered for the conference in San Francisco.
Almost all chief executives recognise the importance of IT to their companies' success, but "almost none of them are satisfied that IT is driving the business outcomes they want", Livermore said.
HP, she said, is committed to expanding and being an all-in-one solution for businesses looking to embrace the combined-services-plus-data-centre concept — scalable, fully automated virtual environments. How HP envisions this architecture is not completely new, she said. It is "in some ways what people have been talking about for a very long time".
The Linux community either currently is or will be factoring into HP's plans in this area. Already, one-third of the servers the company ships are Linux-based. According to Livermore, HP ships a Linux server every minute.
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IT-management software is a market HP wants to own. "You're going to see us invest like crazy" in this area, Livermore said.
HP has already spent a good chunk of change on Mercury Interactive, a management-software maker, which it purchased last year. The company is also buying its way into the virtualisation- and automation-software businesses to compete with IBM's services and software business. Last month, HP announced it will acquire Neoware, a maker of thin-client and virtualisation software, and Opsware, which delivers data centre-automation software. Livermore hinted there will be more to come in this area.
