Service and software

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Our view on SaaS is that it is a service level agreement. - Robin Purohit, vice president and general manager of information management for software at HP.

At the recent HP Software Universe conference, Robin Purohit, vice president and general manager of information management for software at HP, discussed with NME the relevance of software-as-a-service to enterprises, especially during difficult financial times.

Hosted services, together with software-as-a-service (SaaS), are markets that will take on increasing relevance. How much emphasis will HP be placing on these sectors in the coming years?

We are now ranked among the top 10 SaaS providers in the industry. In particular, because of the economic environment we will be pushing more aggressively with our sales, though we have half to two thirds of our portfolio in there already.

This is a little bit of a weird beast and sometimes our sales people are not sure on whether they should introduce it or not, or whether it's insulting to the customer to say we will run it for you, but I believe that this conversation will change. It's not so much as whether we push the offering, but whether or not our sales people get more confident about having that conversation with clients.

I think in particular this applies to elements like monitoring and testing, its not core competence for most companies to want to run these themselves. They would rather get the benefit out of monitoring, use the testing capabilities, but is there a lot of unique added value that they can create from running the tools themselves? Probably not, so letting us do it for them is a better proposition.

When it comes to SaaS, how responsible should software vendors be to ensure that the service meets the requirements and standards of enterprise customers?

It's critical. As far as we are concerned, we are not a cloud provider, we are a SaaS provider. In my opinion, the cloud is a very organic thing; an individual makes a decision to use the service in the cloud and then tomorrow they decide to stop and go to another monitor. The cloud is a much more dynamic environment.

Our view on SaaS is that it is a service level agreement. When we do a SaaS agreement with an enterprise we would sit there and present our service level agreements, negotiate it and then make sure we adhere to them. We do monthly check-ins to make sure we are doing what we said we would do.

To HP, it's an extension of our services arm versus just a cool way to deliver our software, especially because of the type of products we are selling in SaaS; they are business critical monitoring and business critical testing. They are really essential functions and you cannot take them lightly. It's not like just putting your e-mail or sharepoint in the cloud.

What sort of adoption have you seen for the Business Technology Optimisation (BTO) software portfolio, its expansion and add-ons?

I would say that adoption has been very good if you just look at the raw growth and the size of the business now. Revenue of US$3 billion worldwide through licence management services is pretty significant. So for us it's not about whether our strategies are being adopted, but how do we win everywhere.

Our size of business means we want to win mid-market enterprise customers, we want to win all over the world and want to have a network of channel partners increasingly educated to take to market.

One thing we are doing in the quality management area is using very high value channel partners, like SAP. So SAP sells our quality management products as part of every SAP upgrade they do. And just a month ago we agreed to let them sell that to non-SAP markets, because they were seeing so much value being created for customers.

We are always looking to expand our presence but we think that we have significant growth left. In the area surrounding applications the broader strategy is about the application lifecycle. We are getting a little out of our traditional business to extend to this new space and cover the entire operations aspect with our methodology and approach.

That will take us to more head-to-head competition with IBM‘s rational product line, but we believe that in the operations space there is still a lot of space left. Customers are going to want to go with fewer trusted vendors.

Data storage is a massive issue for enterprises around the world as well as the Middle East. What challenges does HP face in addressing this need?

My information management business in the Middle East is doing very well. Apart from just managing information growth, we are also seeing that almost all of the Middle East's oil companies are preparing themselves to have western regulations applied to them.

With all of the market fluctuations there are a lot of regulatory actions, regulatory investigation and price fixing issues cropping up. All of the Middle East's oil companies I have spoken to are anticipating this coming trend.

We have been very successful in establishing our back-up software and our archiving software in particular, which allows us to wrap ourselves around all that unstructured content - e-mails, sharepoint, content management systems. It makes sure that it is retained according to regulatory policies and then can be easily located. This whole process, which is known as e-discovery, is a very hot one for us in the region.

I believe that the archiving software market and the back-up market will survive the downturn even in the Middle East, because you will see the regulatory environment become even more important. That's akin to what I saw in 2001, I think the same thing will happen this time.

In emerging markets, hardware still remains the primary component of any IT budget. What is HP doing to turn this to more software-oriented purchases?

You have to have the business value conversation. We are in an interesting place because for us at HP it's not about ‘buy less hardware and buy more software'.

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