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The prime focus of the 'HP Software Universe-Asia Pacific 2007' event held in Brisbane, Australia, from March 5-9, 2007 was to 'optimize the business outcome of IT'. Following the alliance between HP and Mercury to become HP Software, the five-day initiative was eventful with more than 90 sessions and networking opportunities for hundreds of participants from across the world. Interestingly, this is the first time that the HP Software Forum and Mercury World came together in a bid to offer measurable results when a customer aligns IT with his/her business.

Thomas E Hogan, senior vice president, HP Software (technology solutions group), in his keynote address, "IT means business for all. 80-90% of all business functionality has been touched or enabled by technology. IT has already re-engineered the world and the present opportunity is to re-engineer itself with significant and growing investment of capital and expense."

"Some 65% of IT budgets are spent on operations, 25% earmarked for migrations and upgrades, only 10% is being spent on new services and innovations. Since 65% of IT budgets are earmarked for operations, CIOs face fresh challenges in the new business world. The main challenges of the CIOs include increased complexity, no patience for long-term transformation, while demands outstrip available resources," Hogan added.

According to Hogan, who tried to focus on how to bring out measurable results when using IT in businesses, 50% of IT projects fall short of cost/benefit/value projections and operational spending is 3x of system costs. "With 1,000 to 10,000 change requests coming in a week, we are not surprised to see that 80% of all incidents are self-inflicted. In this circumstance, our mandate will be: efficiency, innovation, risk management, speed and agility. The HP strategy, applications and operations would bridge the gaps between functional IT silos to deliver positive business outcomes," he added.

Business intelligence (BI) is a top priority for CIOs and it has become a hot subject for businesses as they attempt to extract more information out of existing systems. The HP NeoView platform is addressing BI and data warehouse issues. The focus would be on availability, industry standard components, scalability and value. BI is one of the main businesses HP is entering in a big way with an integrated hardware and software platform. The NeoView platform is available today but HP will do a public launch shortly. "We will provide the most scalable offering in the industry as we are not the first to market data warehouse solutions," Hogan said.

HP's vision for BI and data warehousing with NeoView is part of its BI optimization (BIO) section of its software business, alongside business technology optimization (BTO) resulting from the Mercury alliance, and its OpenCall messaging and multimedia platform for telecom service providers.

In the telecom world, tremendous changes are forced by a number of factors including technology, regulation, competition, infrastructure, user experience, and, of course, wallet. Telecom companies have more demands. Easy creation and operation of high volume real time application, real time management of subscribers' location, identity, access rights, easy and flexible creation and operation of multimedia services, end-to-end quality and performance of mobile services are the main needs of customers.

The strategic focus of HP OpenCall service would offer rich content and cost effective services. "We will focus on helping our customers fulfill their objectives for deploying cost effective, flexible infrastructure, better understand and manage customers, create revenue generating multimedia services, develop flexible, innovative pricing solutions, and enhance service quality and performance," says Steven Dietch, director, Worldwide Marketing, HP OpenCall.

Thanks to its innovative strategies, HP is enjoying a leadership position with its OpenCall services. It has 70% market share in SMS-enabling platforms; 100 mn subscribers utilize OpenCall-based mobile prepaid wireless solutions, 200 mn subscribers with 38 service providers in five continents depend on the OpenCall mission-critical home location register and over 4,000 signaling protocol platforms have been deployed worldwide.

Speaking to media, Dietch said that one main tip for CTOs/CEOs to become cost effective will be to consolidate. Consolidation will help in bringing down operation cost. Though consolidation among operators may affect us marginally, it will be a challenge for us and we are equipped to face it, he added.