The Hindu Business Line : The silver lining

Balu Doraisamy is the Senior Vice-President and Managing Director (Asia-Pacific & Japan) of technology multi-major Hewlett-Packard. Based in Singapore, he is responsible for driving overall revenue and profitability in this region and also leads the APJ Technology Solutions Group (TSG) which encompasses enterprise storage and systems, software.

In a recent interview, Doraiswamy tells eWorld why he is bullish on emerging business models that enable ‘everything as a service’. Excerpts:

HP is bullish on everything as a service, right from the infrastructure level, to the platform, to software as a service and the services themselves. However, with cloud computing, security of the end-users’ data has been a major concern. How does HP work around this bottleneck?

Through a wide range of cloud services, customers can manage technology-related services from multiple sources, including in-house, hosted/outsourced, and the cloud.

The promise of cloud computing is appealing because it can reduce business costs and provide greater flexibility and scalability of services throughout the enterprise. However, IT organisations are faced with the challenge of ensuring the security, performance and availability of the cloud services they either provide or consume, thus putting their businesses at risk.

This uncertainty can be an impediment to wider adoption of cloud services by enterprises. HP helps customers validate security by scanning networks, operating systems, middleware layers and Web applications. It also performs automated penetration testing to identify potential vulnerabilities. Software such as Application Security Centre provides customers with an accurate security-risk picture of cloud services to ensure that provider and consumer data are safe from unauthorised access. We also provide customers with a team of expert engineers that performs security scans, executes performance tests and deploys availability monitoring.

Could you throw some light on how the economic slowdown is prompting customers to go for ‘pay as you use’ model? Some statistics would be helpful.

In the current business environment, organisations are focused on controlling costs, streamlining business processes, and optimising efficiency. They also need to be able to capitalise on opportunities that arise even amid the financial downturn. The reality today is most companies will manage a hybrid business environment comprising both traditional infrastructure and the cloud.

Small and medium businesses (SMBs) will have to weigh factors such as corporate and government regulations, security, availability, cost and scalability before choosing the right platform and applications for business. For example, HP is working with the Government of Karnataka on an e-procurement solution that is built on a pay-per-use model covering services and hardware infrastructure. The solution covers all aspects – right from the tendering process to awarding the contract. It has been designed with scalable infrastructure using Intel-based HP Blade servers. The servers were virtualised creating multiple instances to handle peak traffic, thus enabling easy user-interface. Today more than 25 departments are live with the solution and it is being extended to many other departments.

With the advent of 3G in India, what opportunities do you foresee in terms of hardware and software services?

Hewlett-Packard has been undertaking technology research in our Bangalore labs to serve the needs of telecom service providers since 2006. We already provide infrastructure to the telecommunications industry in India. We are supporting a 50-million user CDMA telecom operator with our mobility and subscriber data management solutions. The advent of 3G definitely provides HP with a great opportunity to be of service to the telecom operators in India.

With the integration of EDS, will HP aggressively look at end-to-end services deals in the Indian market?

With domestic industry verticals joining the outsourcing trail, the IT services market is growing fast in India. Over the last two years, HP and EDS have won contracts to provide information technology, applications and business process outsourcing services to transportation, government, automobile and steel sectors in India and China. In addition, campaigns such as EDS Speedsourcing, a subset of the Managed Services Suite, provides alternative outsourcing approach to clients with a faster transition and reduced total cost of ownership (TCO). Delivered in as little as 10 weeks, HP and EDS package enables TCO reduction through global economies of scale.

Virtualisation and storage consolidation are two often used words in the IT context. How much of traction are you seeing currently in the Indian market?

According to a recent study conducted by HP, 48 per cent of Asia-Pacific respondents view the current economic climate as an opportunity to restructure their technology environments for the future. These organisations understand that by deploying a shrewd technology strategy they can come out of the economic downturn ahead of competitors. Executives from across the region indicate that they are either planning or considering the following projects in the next 12 months: Server and storage consolidation (62 per cent); virtualisation (58 per cent); Application modernisation or consolidation (49 per cent) and automation (42 per cent)

There’s a motivation to reduce costs including saving energy bills among all enterprise and large mid-market customers in India. The virtualisation scenario was encouraging and this year, we are seeing enterprises move from just testing the concept to actually deploying it.

Managed print services have not taken off in a big way in India. How do you plan to educate customers here about them?

In today’s challenging economic climate, there is an urgent need for customers to find immediate and near-term ways to cut operating costs, especially if it enables them to reduce their capital expenditure and manage their cash flow. To this end, customers are looking for utility-based models such as Managed Print Services (MPS). Customers are also are realising MPS can bring about lesser environmental impact. Pre- and post-analysis of some HP MPS customers’ imaging and printing operations reveals energy savings of between 30 per cent and 80 per cent and reductions in paper consumption.

adith@thehindu.co.in

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