Barcelona is my favorite European city. I'm delighted to be back here, and am present at the HP DISCOVER event. Wandering around, as one does, I bumped into John Curran, the VP of Product Management, Emerson Network Power. To remind everyone, HP Technology Services entered into a partnership with Emerson as part of HP's Converged Management Consulting Services offer.
Converged Management Consulting specifically addresses the area of linkage between IT software-defined automation and policies, and that of the data center. Linking the entire infrastructure remains the more elusive area of software-defined infrastructure strategies. I asked John why.
Fear! "Fear is the biggest inhibitor to what enterprises do." What is it they fear? "There's a fear on the one hand pf the hype that is out there and how much truth is behind the hype, and on the other hand, a fear of being exposed - that they don't understand and accept that they don't know, so not confront the issue. The biggest fear of all, therefore, is how much value could be derived, and taking a use-case to management to justify spending in this area, that perhaps we don't know too much about."
We're hearing a lot this week, in Barcelona, about The New Style of IT. HP says it's a necessary reaction to today's realities of massive and evermore frequent disruption, which comes from consumer-driven instant gratification requirements, and having the capabilities via mobility to demand it, and the market realities of service-provider-driven IT service provisioning options. IT simply has to react and take itself into a situation where it becomes a value creator by providing speed, efficiency, and simplicity to its users. The dynamics of The New Style of IT require that IT infrastructre is converged, it facilitates hybrid sourcing, and that it is software-defined, which brings us back to the fear aspect.
The fear is really manifested out of the continuing silo'd nature of IT and facilities. Both groups understand that in order for IT to provide the sought-after value, software-defined automation has to, finally, go across these organizational boundaries, and for the data center's critical infrastructure and IT infrastructure to be seamless.
I asked John about how to create this seamless environment. "In technology terms it IS seamless, because the utility into the building is ultimately connected to the software and services delivwered by the data center. However, it's not seamless organizationally, the service management, culture and work practices remain distinct. IT and Facility Ops need to explore where the current inefficiencies lie in their physical world as well as their work practices world. Secondly, understand the steps to address the inefficiencies, and then work with trusted vendors to determine a roadmap to identify and achieve the necessary steps. And this is where the HP/Emerson partnership comes into its own. Emerson brings the DCIM technology response, and HP the brain-trust and organizational savvy to create the facility and IT software-defined linkage. This is key to overcoming the fears I talked about earlier."
John and I nodded in agreement that it's often the case that enterprises are more mature on IT automation policies, and perhaps less so on DCIM, but may have gone down that path because "it's the right thing to do." Where they fail is having gone down that path, they've not achieved the full benefit because the DCIM system does not interface with the IT automation systems. Often, therefore DCIM is implemented as a monitoring tool rather than being a tool to support organizational change leading to efficiency.
"Emerson recognized the value for it's clients is in workiing with HP's facility and IT consultants to create the value derived from organizational change, the seamless environment, and the cross-domain efficiencies in software-defined automation. DCIM no longer sits on the outside, but becomes the golden nugget to enterprise IT efficiency."