HP Articulates Application Migration With Instant-On

HP Tuesday unveiled a series of products and services to help enterprises manage the growing influence of information technology in their organizations now and into the future. The consulting offerings address issues such as application transformation, information optimization, security and hybrid delivery of IT in private clouds, public clouds or on-premise systems. Instant-on also furthers HP's strategy to pull together products and services from across it's broad portfolio delivery IT solutions from consulting to implementation rather than point products.

HP calls this new initiative "Instant-On Enterprise" computing that recognizes that technology is going to evolve beyond just helping to administer the business, but is going to be the innovator for the business and be embedded throughout it.

Three IT megatrends are driving the "Instant-On" initiative, said Lynn Anderson, vice president of marketing for HP Enterprise Business. First is the way technology is driving new business models. For instance, a manufacturer could find that its newest competitor is someone they've never heard of, but which now follows a manufacturing-as-a-service model, in which it contracts with an outside firm to build its new product. Secondly, there are fundamental shifts in IT such as the rise of mobile computing and the increasing interconnectedness of multiple devices.

Over the next decade, as many as 2 trillion devices will have IP addresses as computers, mobile devices, appliances and sensors all connect to the Internet. Thirdly, the changing workforce will be more comfortable using technology in ways previous generations were not. For instance, social media networking helps a company incorporate feedback from partners or customers into development of products and service. There's also the increased "consumerization of IT" in the enterprise, in which employees expect to be able to use personal devices such as iPads in the enterprise and IT managers have to accommodate them.

To prepare for this coming evolution of IT in the enterprise and in government agencies, HP's Instant-On initiative will focus on six areas, which are a combination of hardware, software and services, Anderson explained.First, HP offers software Application Transformation, which manages the application sprawl in many organizations. The typical Fortune 100 corporation has an average of 35 million lines of code to manage and that is growing by 10 percent a year, she said. Many of those applications are legacy apps that have been in use for as many as 16 years. The transformation involves phasing out legacy apps, where possible, or re-hosting them on more cost-efficient hardware platforms.

Secondly, HP is touting its Converged Infrastructure offering, which it has been promoting all year, that helps enterprises design, deploy and manage their IT resources holistically, understanding that it consists of products from other vendors than HP.
Thirdly, HP Enterprise Security seeks to bind security more closely to enterprise development, securing people, processes, technology and content together. In the past, security issues were an inhibitor to IT growth, Anderson said, and this aims to eliminate that roadblock.

HP is also stressing Information Optimization as a way to manage the exabytes of data being generated and which enterprises have to collect, store, secure and analyze to get the greatest business value out of it. Anderson cited industry research that forecasts that by 2015, 50 percent of the data that enterprises will need to run their business will come from outside their organization.

HP is also offering two hybrid technology tools, the HP Hybrid Delivery Strategy Service and the HP Hybrid Delivery Workload Analysis Service. The strategy service provides clients with a model-driven framework to introduce hybrid delivery concepts into the organization and the workload analysis services seeks to best match the application environments to the workload demands in a hybrid environment. By hybrid, Anderson refers to a combination of on-premise, private cloud or public cloud environments.