A: Every CIO we talk to is grappling with two situations simultaneously. They are under very severe cost pressure. There is a radical pull back of resources spent on technology. At the same time, CEOs realise that technology is an advantage, and there is all sort of interest in new business functions, business applications and business organisation initiatives. So something has to be done differently. Two things that we think are the most fundamental right now are automation and standardisation. That is the only way to simplify the role of IT and keep the costs down.

A: We have started seeing a shift in that. Nearly 70-80 percent of customers we talk to think that automation is critical. It is hard to automate if you don’t have standardisation. And most importantly, you have to define what is the best way of doing this before you automate.

A: It varies from the cost and complexities. IT staff runs around trying to fixing tens of things. They must try to gear up all the instrumentation in a coherent and consistent environment. CIOs must standardise the things that will fix the business issues. So, event consolidation, monitoring consolidation are the most fundamental things that CIOs would want to do. Second thing is automation at the beginning of provisioning of setting up the servers or set up the new storage. There are thousands of patch updates, software updates and the maintenance of things.

A: The great news that we have is the number one product position in everything that we do in datacentre - from monitoring to automation to service desk. What we are doing is unifying all those tools into one suite and still being open so that they can integrate whatever they have. But it is the simplest way of automating across all those different domains and providing the executive team whatever is most important for the business. That’s for the CIO.

A: We have done three or four major acquisitions in the last two three years. We have not maintained any of those brands but have maintained the technology. For example in the monitoring space, we have taken HP Openview’s network and systems management products and integrated them with the application monitoring capabilities of Mercury. Peregrine was a product in the service desk area which is upgraded to not only being the best-of-breed service in the service desk space, but all the processes of service management solutions have been integrated with monitoring.

Now I will shift my focus to business technology optimisation (BTO). If you talk about BTO without really thinking about the HP’s BTO strategy, what does a CIO make of it?

CIOs understand what it takes to run a holistic business because they have been providing system to all of their constituents. So they wanted something very similar, something that gives them supply chain integrity that links them with planning, financial decisions and the design and delivery of the new products (in this case business services) and an efficient operation till the end of life in one holistic way. So BTO to us is a strategy for the CIOs.

A: We have a major utility customer in US that was actually using our technology. The new CIO came and found it crazy. He wanted to have one centralised, holistic way. They started to move across the lifecycles by giving tremendous insights into where they were spending their money using our project portfolio management software. They forced every single person to report all of the projects, report them up to the BMO and they made very brutal decisions on what was important for the business and what was tactical. This customer saved almost 15 percent of their IT spending in the first year just by limiting the necessary projects. So that can translate into US$15-20 million. That’s usually the first step when the CIO comes in and transforms the approach.

A: That’s pretty simple. We are considered the leaders in the IT management delivered over SaaS. People now-a-days don’t want to buy software, they just want to use it. They would rather not invest the time in how to configure it, run it and maintain it, if there is a simple way. And also right now you can see there is a lot of pressure to reduce capital expenditure and shift to operating expenditure. So there are two things that can really promise success using SaaS model. It is about simplifying the time for you to decide when you actually get to use it. And also how you make sure you have a consistent run rate on operating cost versus these big amounts of capital spending.