Fiorina: Most customers tend to realize that they are adaptive enough as an enterprise because one of three things happens. Either they realize that they are not utilizing the technology investment they've already made. So, they kind of look around and say, 'Gee, I'm only using 50 percent of the capacity I've invested in.' Secondly, they look around and they say, 'I can't get a hold of the information I want, and because I can't get a hold of the information I want, I can't make decisions fast enough, or I can't execute effectively the decisions I'm going to make.' Example: 'I want to introduce a new product. I want to introduce it in every country in which I have business, and I want to do it all at the same time.' A lot of companies literally can't do that because they don't have the information to support that. So, that's another kind of revelation that people have. And the third revelation that people have is that they're spending too much money because they are duplicating investments. They're duplicating investments, they've built more complexity into their system than they need to. I was speaking with a CIO who said, 'You know, I have 23 supply chains; I probably need nine.'
So, all the way back to your earlier question. One of the things that we want to do, that we want to do with our partners, with customers, is we go in and we assess. Where is someone? And we assess across time, range and ease. Time: How long does it take you to execute a decision that you want to make? Range: How broadly can you deploy a decision? Can you introduce that new product in one country, or can you do it in 20 countries? And ease, how much money and time does it take you do so something?
Q: What products do you see as being most fundamental to the Adaptive Enterprise?
Fiorina: The Adaptive Enterprise has become a strategy road map for us. So we literally have every product, service, solution and software we sell is part of the Adaptive Enterprise. The decision to focus on the Adaptive Enterprise is focusing our choices on a day-to-day basis. So, we are very focused on virtualization in the storage space. A lot of the storage offerings we have delivered over the past 12 months have been delivered in a particular way because of the Adaptive Enterprise. The software acquisitions in the last six months are all very specifically driven by a road map that comes from the Adaptive Enterprise that says, 'OpenView traditionally has managed in this area' [Fiorina points to infrastructure on a quick schematic drawing]. We have to deliver a management software suite that permits customers to manage infrastructure, applications and business processes with a service-level agreement kind of granularity, and therefore we have holes in these places in our software portfolio, and we have been buying companies to fill the holes. So, the Adaptive Enterprise is a map against which our current products, services and solutions fit. It is a framework for our partners to engage with us, and it is a road map for our strategic direction going forward.
Q: How will HP Services change its role as part of this, and what will the partnering strategy be there?
