Q&A

Bridging the technology gap

Jonathan Rende, Vice President and General Manager, Business Technology Optimization, Applications, Software and Solutions, HP, spoke to N Geetha on how BTO can help business to bridge the gaps that exists between IT strategy, applications and operations

Jonathan Rende Vice President and General Manager, Business Technology Optimization

How does the BTO concept work in a customer environment?

The Business technology optimization (BTO) is based on two principles which address issues of business agility, business application deployments, upgrades, and compliance. The other initiative is to take a holistic lifecycle approach to bridge gaps between IT strategy, applications and operations teams which helps the teams to align vertically and horizontally with other teams to drive business and IT efficiency. The BTO software comes in when the partner focuses on strategic IT initiatives such as application deployments and upgrades, aligns functional initiatives such as portfolio management and SOA transformation combined with strategic initiatives, while automating end-to-end processes across the IT organization to promote collaboration, enable teams to share information and capabilities and manage change efficiently.

How BTO help customers in mitigating their business challenges?

It is critical to understand the business challenges of the CIO in the current scenario if BTO has to be used effectively. The role of the CIO is to use business technology in keeping the systems running, to drive business outcomes such as customer satisfaction and increased revenue while ensuring increasing IT efficiency to keep costs down. A comprehensive suite of software products around BTO could mitigate the challenges. The core customer requirements would be around business service management, IT service management, service-driven operations, demand and portfolio management, SOA transformation, quality assurance, performance validation and so on. The solutions would help the CIOs integrate and bridge the gaps between IT silos, align functional initiatives with strategic initiatives which would result in delivering business services that are available and perform to agreed service levels, resolve production problems through end-to-end automation, reduce the risk of both planned and unplanned changes, planning service deliverables, visibility into the actual costs of the IT services delivered in production, optimal utilization of capital, people and assets.

What are the innovations happening on the BTO front?

HP's innovations are around utilizing Web 2.0 application capabilities across the development lifecycle and business needs. The investments with the company have to do with building quality management capabilities, planning, performance testing, and so on. Innovations are centered around creating an enterprise quality management platform that combines test, requirement and defect management into a single Web application with traceability across the entire quality lifecycle. We are investing in creating platform for performance management where the center allows IT to run performance tests more often and with significantly higher productivity across a wide range of application protocols and environments.

What are the various trends driving BTO opportunity?

Gartner has projected that the set of technologies with Web 2.0 will replace Web as we know today. Newly added support for Ajax-based applications in HP Performance Center 9.0 release is particularly important for companies that are taking advantage of leading-edge Web 2.0 which exchange of small amounts of data with a server.

The factors that would drive BTO growth are higher return on investment for the customers. This shows 30 to 40% reduction in application deployment time, and 50% reduction in operations performing tasks. Various industry verticals such as financial, retail and hospitality have been keen on going through the BTO way. Consolidation of operations, quality performance and security strategy project portfolios have been driving adoption growth. HP is also leveraging the EDS association in adding footprints in the BTO space across customer segments. IDC estimates a market size of $200 billion for managed service provider segment, 20 to 30% of which would easily constitute market towards automation and quality management.

— N Geetha