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`Adaptive infrastructure paid rich dividends'

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CIOL Bureau
New Update

Pradeep Chakraborthy

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MAJORDA BEACH (Goa): History was revisited here on the second day of CIOL C-Change. Doing the rewinding act was Srinivasan Sekhar, lab director, Hewlett-Packard. What came to the fore was an insight into the HP-Compaq merger. HP faced the daunting task of amalgamating the two outfits with an adaptive infrastructure, a 24x7 computing environment based on standard building blocks, automated using modular software, establishing supply chain for IT services, according to Sekhar.

``At that point, HP devised the vision of the adaptive infrastructure, which paid rich dividends. It led to lowering costs of IT operations and improving speed in introduction of IT changes, resulting in higher QoS,’’ reminisced Sekhar. “We created a template to detail to achieve our goals. The adaptive infrastructure was measuring progress around business outcomes,” he added.

Addressing the gathering Sekhar mentioned the challenges faced by HP IT while integrating the two large companies. ``There were too many active projects at one time impacting speed of delivery,’’ he said. The two companies had IT resources located at over 100 sites across more than 50 countries. Making the matter difficult was the fact that the percentage of resources time spent on baseline activities versus. innovation projects was quite high. Also making it worse was the business information, which was scattered across hundreds of data marts. Both the companies had very large scale, complex and costly IT environments.

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“We were facing huge data explosion at that time,” said Sekhar.

Elaborating on the benefits from an adaptive infrastructure Sekhar said that it saved the company US $1 billion apart from improving operational efficiency. ``From 87 data centers, HP IT got reduced to a mere six. Next, there was a noticeable improvement in speed. Today, 80 per cent of the IT workforce is focused on innovation and only 20 per cent on maintenance. It also has an enterprise data warehouse. QoS improved as well. The company was able to prioritize IT projects to align with business priorities. The adaptive infrastructure became a showcase for HP’s products and services,’’ explained Sekhar.

The adaptive infrastructure, said Sekhar, was all about the benefits from transforming the IT infrastructure. It has to be integral to achieve the full benefits, said Sekhar. Sekhar further added that integration with partners is necessary which translates into joint R&D and go-ahead.

``HP IT is uniquely positioned to offer the adaptive infrastructure. There is flexibility of implementation and choice of partners,’’ he concluded.

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