Related Faulkner Reports

Hewlett-Packard Company Profile

The Adaptive Enterprise Strategy,
unveiled in 2003, blended architecture, hardware, software, and
services with the aim of helping organizations become more
agile, fluid, and responsive to shifting business and market
demands. At that time the concept of Service Oriented
Architecture (SOA) was beginning to be frequently
discussed. HP proposed a related strategy that focused on its
own products. Its launch followed on the heels of IBM’s “On
Demand” announcement, in which that company proposed selling
processing power by billing according to customer usage levels,
similar to the metered billing model employed by water and
electricity utilities. HP countered with its Adaptive Enterprise
Strategy, later modified and renamed Adaptive Infrastructure
Strategy.

Citing lessons learned through the company’s integration of HP
and Compaq operations, the company touted its ability to help
customers boost their information technology ROI by
reengineering their IT systems to be more adaptable to business
process changes. HP’s on-demand processing model aimed at
combining its hardware, Darwin enterprise reference
architecture, OpenView network management software technology,
data center, and services resources to offer distributed
processing solutions comparable in design and functional breadth
to IBM’s end-to-end offerings. 

The HP approach, now known as HPE ConvergedSystems, intends to
link management software, storage, servers, and networking,
creating an infrastructure capable of carrying “big data” over
both networks and mobile devices. Features include: Assessment
and Planning, Governance, Center of Excellence, Architecture
Services, Design and Development, and Management Services.

Whether or not an enterprise adopts the specific approach that
HPE offers, the Adaptive Infrastructure Strategy offers useful
ways to view the processes of the enterprise’s network.

Description

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HP’s ConvergedSystems approach, first known as Adaptive
Enterprise Strategy, was unveiled in 2003. Where IBM put
promotional emphasis on a model of utility computing remotely
hosted by Big Blue at its own data centers, HP’s grid computing
strategy was focused more on providing a
hardware/software/infrastructure platform through which the
enterprise could centralize and tailor its existing IT
operations to support its unique business needs. HP
characterized the Adaptive Enterprise strategy with what it
called guideposts, listed in Table 1:

It will readily be seen that these guideposts have general
application, in particular to SOA, which was already being
discussed while HP’s Adaptive Enterprise Strategy was originally
being unveiled. The market reacted to the Adaptive Enterprise
Strategy cautiously, citing lack of technical clarity, obscure
pricing, and a general uncertainty about what the strategy
entailed, fueled in part by a proliferation of product names and
a lack of consistency in presentation. In succeeding years HP
has changed both the name and the elements of the approach
several times.

Adaptive Enterprise was initially adopted by a significant
number of customers. Over the following years the main emphasis
at HP has shifted from Adaptive Enterprise to Adaptive
Infrastructure (AI), particularly as-a-service or outsourced
(AiaaS), and from there to Converged Infrastructure,
ConvergedSystems, and HPE ConvergedSystems. HP claims that its
strategy upholds ITIL standards. HP has also endorsed SOA with
its Center of Excellence.

The components of HPE ConvergedSystems include:

• HPE ConvergedSystem 300 for Microsoft
  Analytics Platform
• HPE ConvergedSystem 700 architected for Hybrid
  Infrastructure
• HPE ConvergedSystem 900 SAP HANA Scale-up
  Configurations

Associated with HPE ConvergedSystems are hardware offerings
including HPE Hyper Converged 380, HPE Hyper Converged 250 HPE
BladeSystem, HPE 3PAR, and HPE OneView. According to HP, its
ConvergedSystems services offer clients the opportunity to
standardize server and storage resources, consolidate and virtualize
the infrastructure, build in resiliency, continuity, and security,
standardize management tools and process, consolidate and modernize
applications, and automate the infrastructure, through:

• HP Data Center Transformation and Security solutions –
  consolidation and virtualization, energy and space efficiency,
  process automation, business continuity and availability services.
• HP Service Management solutions – management of the
  IT life-cycle, relating technology to the strategic goals of the
  enterprise, reorienting IT to the role of a service provider.
• HP Application Modernization Services – acceleration of
  modernization of legacy systems, mainframe migration to
  standards-based computer based platforms.

HP introduced the enterprise to its Adaptive Infrastructure
approach by applying its Converged Infrastructure Maturity Model and
its Adaptive Infrastructure Capacity Model, both examples of
Adaptive Infrastructure Maturity Models (AIMM), an analysis tool
that provides a picture of possible adaptive steps for the
organization to take.

HP has continued to modify and
expand its ConvergedSystems Strategy under the Insight
Control and Insight Management Software labels. Insight Dynamics
is intended to manage HP and other operating systems,
software, and hardware in the same way, through Insight
Orchestration, used for adding components to the
network; Insight Recovery, a restart utility; Insight
Control, for managing servers; and Insight Dynamics, for deploying
them. In 2008 HP+- moved to capture a share of the midsize
market with its Adaptive Infrastructure in a Box product.

Analysis

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A number of vendors have emphasized their ability to assist
customers in streamlining and retrofitting IT functions to respond
more quickly and flexibly to business process-driven variations in
computing demand levels. IBM’s decision to mold its solutions and
services operations around its OnDemand model did much to
legitimize the utility computing concept among corporate
customers, although skepticism continued. 

HP was the next major vendor to announce an all-encompassing
hardware/software/services IT-business process integration agenda,
with its Adaptive Enterprise (later Adaptive Infrastructure, and
now HPE ConvergedSystems) strategy. Sun Microsystems took a more
UNIX-focused approach to dynamic network resource allocation as it
developed its N1 architecture and N1 provisioning packages, now
called the Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center.

HP attempted to build industry support through technology and
consulting alliances with major players including Computer
Associates, Cognos, Deloitte Consulting, EMC, Informatica, InfoSys
Manhattan Associates, Microsoft, Oracle, Reuters, SAP, and
Symantec VMWare. At the same time less vendor-specific
trends affected the market, among them Service Oriented
Architecture (SOA) and Software as a Service (SaaS). 

Both SOA and SaaS rely more on features of the Internet than on
particular vendors. SOA is designed to use Web parts in modular,
reusable fashion, although conceptually it is not limited to Web
parts. SaaS outsources software using applications running on the
Internet. HP offered its Adaptive Infrastructure line as a service
(AIaaS), but some of its momentum was stolen by SOA, since HP
markets its utility computing agenda as cost-effective in its
potential to eliminate infrastructure redundancies, centralize and
simplify administration, and create economies of scale, and the
same can be said of SOA. Businesses may also be reluctant to
endorse a single-source solution. HPE now offers its HPE Systinet
as an SOA product.

The company continues to heavily promote the centralization
strategy design for reducing IT total cost of ownership, under a
continuing series of different names, attempting to persuade CIOs
to re-conceptualize IT operations in general, and data centers in
particular, as profit centers rather than cost centers. Like
competitors IBM and Oracl, the company proposes a utility
computing blueprint that requires a portfolio of hardware,
software, and services for delivery.

Recommendations

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There is no question that the guideposts of HP’s adaptive
enterprise and adaptive infrastructure strategies and its
successor HPE ConvergedSystems – guideposts of simplification,
standardization, modularization, and integration – are crucial to
the efficient operation of today’s IT shops, and are widely
recognized as such. “Caveat emptor” applies, however, to
commitment to a single-vendor solution, unless the enterprise
already relies on that vendor. The increasing recognition of SOA
and SaaS, plus the development of platform non-specific solutions,
make the selection of a single vendor one possible choice out of
many. Obviously the choice is one of great importance.

Furthermore, on-demand solutions are not necessarily the best fit
for all organizations. Some IT environments are adequate for
supporting business process shifts, in which case the expense
entailed in migrating to the utility model may not be justifiable.
Larger organizations will obviously realize more compelling
savings from economies of scale and reduced asset redundancies
than will smaller ones. In general utility-based IT centralization
solutions may be beneficial in dealing with the following:

• Data accessibility/exchange issues for business operations
  caused by siloed IT systems. 
• Corporate expansion and/or merger-related system and staffing
  redundancies. 
• Enterprise asset management and/or infrastructure scalability
  issues. 
• Significant variations in server loads and operating
  platforms.
• Overstaffing of server administrators.

Web Links

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• HPE: http://hpe.com
• IBM: http://www.ibm.com/
• Microsoft: http://www.microsoft.com/
• Oracle: http://www.oracle.com/

About the
Author

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Kirk Woodward is a technical writer and project manager.
He is a member of the Society for Technical Communication. In
addition to project management, Mr. Woodward’s areas of expertise
include enterprise software, hardware systems, and the use of
Internet resources.

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