'PC business is still healthy in cloud/BYOD era'

BANGALORE, INDIA: Faisal Paul, head, marketing & solution alliances, Enterprise Group, HP India in an interview with Srinivas Rasoor and Deepa Damodaran of CIOL. Excerpts:

CIOL: What is the response from the CIO community with regards to the consolidations and changes that HP had undergone in the past couple of months?

Faisal Paul: Three months back we merged HP IPG and PSG into a single group and also consolidated our enterprise side, including technology services, server, networking, storage and sales.

CIOs from the IT community have welcomed the change because consolidation shortens sales and purchase cycle for them

Consolidation is driving IT industry today. A mobile is a PC cum telephone cum camera device. Same will probably happen on the compute side as well. A tablet is already acting as a notebook and a laptop today,.

Whilst we are very strong in the product side, we are putting a lot of emphasis on the big bets such as cloud, security, data management, big data, mobility etc. While we know that consolidation is the way to go, we essentially wanted to stick to the compute side of the business.

CIOL: Will tablets' entry into enterprise space affect PC growth?

Faisal Paul: While we are seeing consolidation, we have not really seen the market for PCs shrinking. Instead, we are seeing growth. We have seen tablets coming, smartphone vendors ramping up, but at the same time we have also seen the volumes in PC shipment going up.

Today people own more than one device. BYOD is here and is expected to consolidate everything on one device.

Still, many things have to fall in place with regards to mobile payment, security, mobile applications for BYOD to be reality in its true sense. So far PC (laptops and desktops) is not suffering and the business is healthy.

CIOL: What is the reality when it comes to cloud adoption in India?

Faisal Paul: People are talking about cloud, but I will not be surprised if they are still in the virtualization stage.

It will be very difficult to have everything on the cloud, because people will still prefer to have some element in the traditional computing environment. Having a 100 per cent cloud is not possible for large and medium sized businesses as they have a lot of sensitive data.

What is happening now is that since budgets are very constraint, CIOs want to build a private cloud within their environment and switch it on when they need it and switch it off when they do not.

They are also evaluating public cloud, especially to cater to sudden peak in loads in a pay-per-usage model.

So, what we are seeing is a hybrid organisation kind of an environment. This is with regards to large and medium organisations.

Whereas, small organisation can have 100 per cent cloud architecture model because they do not have much investment on the IT front.

We have the most number cloud, cloud system matrix; a cloud environment, implementation in India. We have deployed over 100 customers in CloudSystem in the country.

CIOL: How is the server and storage industry changing with the entry of cloud?

Faisal Paul: The server industry moved to cloud with the invention on blade, and HP pioneered the blade concept. The blade comes with an enclosure that had seven-year life cycle. So, any advancement that the industry did on processor, SAN, cable, router, switch was built in as the chasis had everything and need not be changed.

Server virtualization began there. Similarly, things are underway on the storage side. With converged storage (3Par, Ibrix) we utilize server, storage and networking. This gave rise to Virtualization and then cloud.

Vendors like us have to adopt to changing technologies. We were the first one to bring up the concept of converged infrastructure two years back, when no major vendor was talking about it. There were some gaps in networking and storage fronts then, which we have addressed with acquisitions. We have also added cloud features into it.

Now, it is complete in terms of portfolio. We are investing in acquisitions ahead of the curve. HP Project Voyager, Odessey and Moonshot are our investments for the future.