HP: IT Will Never Return To Pre-Crisis State

The global financial crisis has fundamentally changed the economy and pre-recession approaches to technology will never return, according to HP.

Speaking at the company’s European Software Universe event in Hamburg this week, Jan Zadak – HP senior vice president of sales, enterprise business – said that the IT industry and business in general have been fundamentally altered by the global financial crisis and would never return to their pre-recession state.

“As I travel around Europe people ask me when are things going to return to how they were. I don’t think it will get back to where it was ever – the world has changed,” he said.

According to Zadak, the impact of the recession has been to make IT departments more focused on efficiency, controlling costs and improving flexibility. Specifically, he said that chief information officers should help their companies spot and respond to future trends and ensure that information across the business can be accessed to adapt to those changing conditions

“If you are a CIO of an enterprise… you need to enable the company to look around the corner and leverage the information that is in data pools across the company,” he said

HP added that cloud technologies will be important to giving companies the flexibility to respond to changing conditions and new trends. The company announced three new products around cloud computing at the event in Hamburg which included an addition to HP’s Operations Orchestration
infrastructure management technology that allows companies to add cloud resources from providers such as Amazon EC2 in the same way they would add physical infrastructure.

“What we have done is take all that automation from inside IT to extend that so you can extend your capacity and use Amazon EC2.,” said Robin Purohit, HP vice president of software products “Companies can get temporary resources from Amazon when they need it and the key thing is they can do it exactly the same way as they would do it internally.”

Another theme explored by HP at the Christmas-themed event in Hamburg, was the amount of attention IT departments currently have to devote to day-to-day management of systems versus actually helping their businesses innovate and compete more effectively.

“Research has shown that 60 to 70 percent of IT spend is being spent on keeping the lights on and the rest on innovation – we think there is opportunity to flip that ratio around. Cloud can be one enabler to start and continue that journey,” said Steen Lomholt-Thomsen HP’s general manager for Europe.