7-Eleven Turns To HP To Streamline Operations
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The rollout of new servers and networking switches in stores is part of a five-year agreement supporting 7-Eleven&#39;s Retail Information System.
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Investor's Business Daily - A week after shaking up its enterprise hardware business following a poor showing last quarter, Hewlett-Packard put its best face forward before more than 7,000 customers and partners at the HP World conference in Chicago.
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Hewlett-Packard next year will take a fresh approach to its utility computing initiative with a product designed to reduce the cost of running corporate computing systems.
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Hewlett-Packard Co., aiming to beef up its erratic enterprise computing business with new products, said Monday it is launching new high-end and mid-range server-computers and related software and services early this week.
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(InfoWorld) - Hewlett-Packard Co. president and chief executive officer Mark Hurd, speaking at a user conference Monday in Houston, told customers the company's goal is to listen to them more and respond to their needs more quickly. In a keynote address at the HP Technology Forum, which made only passing reference to the scandal that has rocked the company for the last two weeks, Hurd said "HP has made a lot of progress, but we've got a lot more to do." HP is on track to record about US$91 billion in revenue and an operating profit of $8 billion to $9 billion in fiscal year 2006, he said. That leaves $83 billion in costs that the Palo Alto, California-based company still needs to scrutinize for efficiencies. HP announced in July 2005 a restructuring that would result in the elimination of 15,300 jobs to save $1.9 billion in operating costs by the end of its fiscal year Oct. 31. Hurd told the Houston audience that while cutting some jobs, it is creating others and reinvesting in other areas to develop new opportunities for growth. "We want to spend money to realign our IT and make those investments so in the long term we save money," he said. Randy Mott, HP's executive vice president and chief information officer, explained the progress of HP's consolidation of 85 of its own data centers into six centers, two each in Austin and Houston, Texas, and Atlanta, Georgia. HP projects that consolidation will save the company about $1 billion in IT costs over the next few years. The company gave some of the 5,000 attendees a tour of one of the Houston centers to see how they might consolidate their own IT infrastructures. Hurd's one applause line in his presentation was his admission that HP needs to be more responsive to customers during the sales cycle: "When we actually show up at the account, we actually get more business than when we don't. We're working on that right now." To be more responsive, HP has cut the length of contract terms and conditions by two-thirds to make them easier to understand, said Ann Livermore, executive vice president of the technology solutions group, in her keynote. That was welcome news to Sam Ayers of the Information Technology User (ITUG) Group, representing users of HP's NonStop server line. Ayers chaired an ITUG Advocacy Committee which pushed for the streamlined contract terms. "It took a long time for that to be decided, but it's here," he said. Ayers is an IT professional with Chase Paymentech Solutions LLC, the largest credit, debit and gift card payment processor in the U.S. Hurd took only a handful of pre-screened questions from the audience and after his speech was quickly escorted out of the convention center and into a waiting Lincoln sport utility vehicle. Aides and security guards prevented a reporter from approaching him with questions about the HP board scandal. State, federal and congressional investigations are probing allegations that HP hired a private investigations firm to find out who was leaking news of HP board deliberations to the media. The private agency allegedly obtained private phone records of directors and reporters under false pretenses to find out who they were calling. Media reports Monday said investigative methods also included physical surveillance of people and an attempt to install surveillance software on a reporter's computer. Hurd made only a brief reference to the scandal in his keynote. When he mentioned that Jack Novia, HP's managing director of the Americas region and senior vice president of the customer solutions group, was throwing out the first ball at a Houston Astros baseball game Tuesday evening, Hurd said: "I asked him not to embarrass the company, given the press coverage we've gotten over the last week."
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Company says that instead of just performance, customers now want manageability features and lower power consumption.
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Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) announced on Monday that it has formed a new division within its Enterprise Storage and Servers Group chartered with unifying the company's blade system development efforts.
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(InfoWorld) - Hewlett-Packard has begun shipping a new product that the company thinks will give it an edge over rival IBMÂ in the market for blade servers. Beginning Tuesday, HP is set to begin delivering Virtual Connect, a management tool for its BladeSystem c-Class servers to more easily add blade servers to a network. Using Virtual Connect, which the company announced in June 2006, an enterprise can set up its data center network infrastructure ahead of time and then more easily add, subtract, change or move around servers as needed. Currently, enterprises deploy switches in their datacenter networks to connect servers to storage appliances. They're relatively cheap, but each of those switches is one more piece of hardware on the network that administrators need to manage, said Mark Potter, vice president of HP's BladeSystem business. Another alternative is to install a "patch panel," which doesn't require any separate management but is very expensive to deploy. Adding servers is also very time-consuming and requires the involvement of a company's server manager, network manager, storage manager, and others, Potter said. What should be a 30-minute task can sometimes take hours or even days. One HP customer told Potter it once took 58 days. "You know when they give you a number like 58 days that they've measured it and they're not happy about it," he said. Virtual Connect is built in to the datacenter infrastructure when it is first created. Then new servers can be simply plugged in and turned on. "We can wire up the infrastructure one time, physically, and basically walk away," Potter said. "Then the server admin can add, replace, and change servers on the fly without ever impacting the networking admin or the storage admin." Virtual Connect is hardware and middleware that sits between the blade server and the network switches that connect to storage. Virtual Connect for a network using Ethernet switches carries a starting list price of $5,699. For Fibre Channel networks, it starts at $9,499. Also Tuesday, HP is set to begin shipping a new blade server, the ProLiant xw460c (list price: $4,329), which HP describes as the first workstation blade for the c-Class blade product line. Virtual Connect is a unique solution to a data center headache, said Gordon Haff, principal analyst with Illuminata. "Virtual Connect does not eliminate [the work of configuring a network]. It still might take three or four weeks to do all that," Haff said. "But the idea is that you can basically do it once." Figures released Feb. 21 by Gartner show that IBM is the top blade seller but HP is gaining. HP's share of the x86 platform blade market, based on revenue, rose to 33 percent in 2006 from 32 percent in 2005, while IBM's fell to 40 percent from 42 percent, said Jeffrey Hewitt, a Gartner analyst. At the same time, though, the x86 blade market is growing. Global blade server revenue grew to $2.7 billion in 2006 from $2 billion in 2005 and unit shipments grew to 727,000 from 548,000 the year before, according to the Gartner report.
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By Clint Swett, The Sacramento Bee, Calif.  Feb. 24--Mirroring a business trend that's been building for two decades, Hewlett-Packard Co.
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HP's new Mercury Project and Portfolio Management Center 7.0 is designed to help companies optimize their IT development resources based and standardize how the health of those projects is measured.
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Building on last year's acquisition of Mercury Interactive, Hewlett-Packard this week rolled out a slew of new business optimization products and services at its Software Universe conference in Las Vegas.
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The PC maker navigated major transitions in the executive suite and its business model in 2007.
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HP, at its Technology Forum in Las Vegas, said it is developing storage technology that more accurately assigns storage capacity as needed in an enterprise.
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Mixes-up mid-market merchandise Hewlett-Packard is pushing four new ProLiant servers destined for the wiring closets of mid-sized businesses. According to HP's Proliant marketing director John Gromala, the new systems will revamp the company's SMB gear with more compact systems and lower prices.â¦
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Computer giant Hewlett-Packard wants to make it easier to sell to small and medium-size companies.
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By DAVID KOENIG     ROCKWALL, Texas  -- Sherry Neal checked the refrigerated shelves of her 7-Eleven store, touched the screen of a small handheld computer and got an instant four-week sales history on turkey sandwiches.    With a couple taps on the wireless device, the store manager placed an order for the next day's sandwiches without ever leaving the aisle...
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By Brad Hem, Houston Chronicle  Feb. 18--An engineering team at HP had figured out how to squeeze a faster and more powerful computer server into one-third the traditional space. That was supposed to be the hard part.