Energy-efficient Ethernet switch modules from HP help cut power use and TCO

HP today announced the availability of new energy-efficient Ethernet switches, designed to help companies deal with the data explosion, while, at the same time, cutting power needs and reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO) by some 51 percent.

The company says that it's E-Series zl modules are the first devices that conform to the IEEE Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) standard 802.3az. The switches reduce power consumption by automatically entering sleep mode when no traffic is being transmitted. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Many companies today are caught between competing pressures brought by data and power. Faced with moving ever increasing data faster and faster, they find the power to do that, as well as deal with the associated cooling, expensive and increasingly unavailable.

Sleep mode

The modules, which fit into existing switches, address this by going into sleep mode, as will EEE-connected devices in the absence of traffic. Because most network traffic comes in bursts, these devices are good candidates for energy efficiency.

The modules also address another concern, which is latency in the network. According to Jay Mellman, Director of Network Product and Solutions Marketing, the modules function with an instant-on capability and will wake up immediately upon detecting traffic, eliminating latency.

In a study conducted by the Tolly Group, power and cooling savings from the energy-efficient modules ranged from 17 to 26 percent, when compared to traditional switches. The lower operating costs, combined with lower acquisition costs resulted in a decrease of up to 51 percent in TCO.

HP assisted in developing the EEE standard and the company plans to incorporate it across multiple devices. including servers, laptops, and wireless devices.

You may also be interested in:

• HP's new ALM 11 helps guide IT through shifting landscape of modern application development
  
• Dave Shirk details how HP's Instant-On Enterprise initiative takes aim at shifting demands on business and governments
  
• New book explores automating the managed applications lifecycle to accelerate delivery of business applications

Salesforce revs up the cloud data tier era with Database.com

San Francisco -- Salesforce.com at its Dreamforce conference here today debuted a database in the cloud service, Database.com, that combines attractive heterogeneous features for a virtual data tier for developers of all commercial, technical and open source persuasions.

Salesforce.com is upping the ante on cloud storage services by going far beyond the plain vanilla elastic, pay-as-you-go variety of database and storage services that have come to the market in the past few years, with Amazon Web Services as a leading offering. [Disclosure: Salesforce.com helped defray the majority of travel costs for me to attend Dreamforce this week.]

Database.com offers as a service a cross-language, cross-platform, elastic pricing data tier that should be smelling sweet to developers and -- potentially -- enterprise architects. Salesforce, taking a page from traditional database suppliers like Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and SAP/Sybase, recognizes that owning the data tier -- regardless of where it is -- means owning a long-term keystone to IT.

If the new data tier in the cloud service is popular, it could disrupt not only the traditional relational database market, but also the development/PaaS market, the Infrastructure as a Service market, and the middleware/integration markets.

Even more fascinating is the prospect of Database.com becoming a new data services resource darling of open source developers, just as they are losing patience and interest in MySQL, now under the stewardship of Oracle since it bought Sun Microsystems. This is a core constituency that is in flux and is being courted assiduously by Amazon, VMWare, Google and others.

IBM, Microsoft and Oracle will need to respond to Database.com -- as will Google, Amazon and VMware -- first for open source, mobile and start-up developers and later -- to an yet uncertain degree -- enterprise developers, systems integrators and more conservative ISVs.

So, be sure, the race is on generally to try and provide the best cloud data and increasingly integrated PaaS services at the best cost that proves its mettle in terms of performance, security, reliability and ease of use. If recent cloud interest and adoption are any indication, this could be killer cloud capability that becomes a killer IT capability.

Database.com already raises the stakes for cloud storage providers and wannabes: the value-add to the plain vanilla storage service has to now entice developers with meeting or exceeding Salesforce.com. By catering to a wide swath of tools, frameworks, IT platforms and mobile device platforms, Salesforce.com is heading off the traditional vendors at trying to (not too fast) usher their installed bases to that own vendors brand of hybrid and cloud offerings. Think a lock-in on the ground segue to a lock-in in the sky slick trick.

Both Amazon and Salesforce.com have proven that developers are not timid about changing how they attain value and resources. This may well prove true of how to access and procure data tier services, too, which makes the vendors slick cloud segue trick all the more tricky. Instead of going to the DBA for data services, all stripes of developers could just as easily (maybe more easily) fire up a value-added Database.com instance and support their apps fast and furious.

The stakes are high on attracting the developers, of course, because the more data that Salesforce attracts with Database.com, the more integration and analytics they can offer -- which then attracts even more data and applications -- and developer allegiance -- and so on and so on. It's a value-add assemblage activity that Salesforce has already shown aptness with Force.com.

What remains to be seen is if this all vaults Salesforce.com beyond it roots as a CRM business applications SaaS provider and emerging PaaS ecosystem supporter for good. If owning the cloud data tier proves as instrumental to business success (as evidenced by Oracle's consistence in generating envious profit margins) as the on-premises, distributed computing DB business -- well, Salesorce.com is looking at a massive business opportunity. And, like the Internet in general, it can easily become an early winner takes all affair.

It's now a race for scale and value, that cloud-based data accumulation can become super sticky, with the lock-in coming from inescapably attractive benefits, not technical or license lock-in. Can you say insanely good data services? Sure you can. But more easily said than done. Safesforce has to execute well and long on its audacious new offering.

But what if? Like a rolling mountainside snowball gathering mass, velocity and power, Database.com could quickly become more than formidable because of the new nature of data in the cloud. Because the more data from more applications amid and among more symbiotic and collaborative ecosystems, the more insights, analytics and instant marketing prowess the hive managers (and hopefully users) gain.

In the end, Database.com could become a pervasive business intelligence services engine, something that's far more valuable than a cheap and easy data tier in the sky for hire.

Case study: AIG insurance group leverages ALM to attain IT performance architecture advantage

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.

Barcelona -- Welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series coming to you from the HP Software Universe 2010 Conference in Barcelona.

We're here in the week of November 29, 2010 to explore some major enterprise software and solutions, trends and innovations making news across HP’s ecosystem of customers, partners, and developers. [See more on HP's new ALM 11 offerings.]

This customer case-study from the conference focuses on AIG-Chartis insurance and how their business has benefited from ongoing application transformation and modernization projects.

To learn more about AIG-Chartis insurance’s innovative use of IT consolidation and application lifecycle management (ALM) best practices, I interviewed Abe Naguib, Director of Global Performance Architecture and Infrastructure Engineering at AIG-Chartis in Jersey City, NJ.

Here are some excerpts:

Naguib: AIG is a global insurance firm, supporting worldwide international insurance of different varieties.

We're structured with 1,500 companies and roughly about eight lines of businesses that manage those companies. Each group has their own CIO, CTO, COO structure, and I report to the global CTO.

What we look at is supporting their global architecture and performance behavioristics, if you will. One of the key things is how to federate the enterprise in terms of architecture and performance, so that we can standardize the swing over into the Java world, as well as middleware and economy of scale.

When I came on board to standardize architecture, and I saw there was a proliferation of various middleware technologies. As we started going along, we thought about how to standardize that architecture.

As we faced more and more applications coming into the Java middleware world, we found that there’s a lot of footprint waste and there’s a lot of delivery cycles that are also slipped and wasted. So, we saw a need to control it.

After we started the architectural world, we also started the production support world and a facility for testing these environments. We started realizing, again, there were things that impacted business service level agreements (SLAs), economy of scale, even branding. So, we asked, how do we put it together?

One of the key things is, as we started the organizational performance, we were part of QA, but then we realized that we had to change our business strategy, and we thought about how to do that. One key thing is we changed our mindset from a performance testing practice to a performance engineering practice, and we've evolved now to performance architecture.

The engineering practice was focused on testing and analyzing, providing some kind of metrics. But, the performance architectural world now has influence into strategies, design practices, and resolution issues. We're currently a one-man or one-army team, kind of a paratrooper level. We're multi-skilled, from architecture, to performance, to support, and we drive resolution in the organization.

We also saw that resolution had to happen quickly and effectively. Carnegie Mellon did a study about five years ago and it said that post-live application resolution of performance issues was seven times the cost of pre-live [performance application resolution].

In other words, we realized that the faster we resolved issues, the faster to market, the faster we can address things, the less disruption to the delivery practices.

Too many people involved

In normal firefighting mode, architecture is involved, development is involved, and infrastructure is involved. What ends up happening is there are too many people involved. We're all scrambling, pointing fingers, looking at logs. So, we figured that the faster we get to resolution, the better for everyone to continue the train on the track.

... I have experience with Quality Center and the improvements that have gone on over the years. Because of our focus, we built our paradigm out of QA and into the performance world, and we started focusing on improving that process.

The latest TruClient product, which is a LoadRunner product, has been a massive groundbreaking point solution. In the last two years, frankly, with HP and Mercury getting adjusted, there’s been kind of a lag, but I have to give kudos to the team. [See more on HP's new ALM 11 offerings.]

One of the key things is that they have opened up their doors in terms of the delivery, in terms of their roadmap. I've worked extensively for the last roughly year with their product development team, and they have done quite a bit of improvement in their solution.

Good partnership role

They have also improved their service support model; the help desk actually resolves questions a lot faster. And we also have a good partnership role, and we actually work with things that we see, and to the influence of their roadmap as well.

This TruClient product has been phenomenal. One of the key things we're seeing now is BPM solutions are more Ajax-based, and there are so many varieties of Ajax frameworks out there than we know how to deal with. One of the key things with the partnership is that we're able to target what we need, they are able to deliver, and we are able to execute.

LoadRunner and TruClient allow us to get in front of the console, work with the business team, capture their typical use cases in a day-in-the-life scenario, and automate that. That gets buy-in and partnership with the business.

We're also able to execute a test case now and bring that in front of the IT side and show them the actual footprint from a business perspective and the impact and the benefits. What ends up happening is that now we're bringing the two teams together. So, we're bridging the gap basically from execution.

... We also started working with the CIOs to figure out a strategy to develop a service-level target, if you will. As we went along, we began working with the development teams to build a relationship with the architectural teams and the infrastructure teams.

We became more of a team model, building more of a peace-maker model. We regrouped the organization, so that rather than resolve and point fingers at each other, we resolved issues a lot faster.

Now, we're able to address the issue. We call it "isolate, identify, and resolve." At that point, if it’s a database issue, we work directly with the DBA. If it’s an infrastructure or architecture issue, we work directly with that group. We basically cut the cycle down in the last two or three years by about 70 percent.

A lot more CIOs have started bringing in more applications. We see a trend growth internally of roughly about 20-30 percent every year.

Because there is a change in our philosophy, in our strategy to focus more on business value, a lot more CIOs have started bringing in more applications. We see a trend growth internally of roughly about 20-30 percent every year.

I have a staff of nine. So, it’s a very agile, focused team, and they're very delivery-conscious. They're very business value-conscious, and we translate our data, the metrics that we capture, into business KPIs and infrastructure KPIs.

Because of that metric, the CIOs love what we do, because we make them look good with the business, which helps foster the relationship with the business, which helps them justify transformation in the future.

There is a new paradigm now, they call it the "Escalator Message." In 60 seconds or less, we can talk to a CIO, CTO, COO, or CFO about our strategy and how we can help them shift from the firefighting mode to more of an architecture mode.

If that’s the case, the more they can salvage their delivery, the more they can salvage their effective costs, and the more they can now shift to more of an IT-sensitive solutions shop. That helps build a business relationship and helps improve their economy of scale.

I would definitely send the message out to think in business value. Frankly, nobody really cares as much about the footprint cost, until they start realizing the dollars that are spent.

Also, now, business wants to see us more involved from the IT side, in terms of solutions, top-line improvements, and bottom-line improvements. As the performance teams expand and mature and we have the right toolsets, innovative toolsets like TruClient, we're able to now shift the cost of waste into a cost of improvements, and that’s been a huge factor in the last couple of years.

Last, I would say that in 8,000+ engagements -- we're actually closing in on now 10,000 events this year -- we've seen roughly $127 million in infrastructure savings that we have recouped. Again, that helps to benefit the firm. Instead of waste, now we're able to leverage that into more improvement side.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.

You may also be interested in:

• HP Software GM Jonathan Rende on how ALM enables IT to modernize businesses faster
  
• HP rolls out ALM 11 in Barcelona to expand managed automation for modern applications
• HP's new ALM 11 helps guide IT through shifting landscape of modern application development
  
• Dave Shirk details how HP's Instant-On Enterprise initiative takes aim at shifting demands on business and governments
  
• New book explores automating the managed applications lifecycle to accelerate delivery of business applications

Case study: Enel Green Power uses PPM to gain visibility, orchestrate myriad energy activities across 16 countries

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.

Barcelona -- Welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series coming to you from the HP Software Universe 2010 Conference in Barcelona.

We're here in the week of November 29, 2010 to explore some major enterprise software and solutions, trends and innovations making news across HP’s ecosystem of customers, partners, and developers. [See more on HP's new ALM 11 offerings.]

This customer case-study from the conference focuses on Enel Green Power and how their Italian utility business has benefited from improved management of core business processes and gained visibility into new energy projects, also adhering to compliance through better planning and the ability to scope out new projects comprehensively. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

To learn about Enel Green Power’s innovative use of project and portfolio management (PPM), I interviewed Massimo Ferriani, CIO of Enel Green Power in Rome.

Here are some excerpts:

Ferriani: Enel Green Power is one of the leaders in the renewables market ... We're in all the most mature technologies such as hydro, geothermal, wind, and solar.

If you think about a matrix to cross technologies and countries, we have a lot of trouble, because we operate four technologies in 16 countries.

It's difficult because we have more than 300 plants all around the world. So, it's an asset portfolio that we have to operate, and we have to reduce the risks.

When we decided to deploy IT platforms, we didn’t think that it was a good idea to deploy conventional-generation IT platforms, but to build up new platforms more fitted to renewables' needs.

We thought about the main objective in deploying these platforms and said, "Okay, maybe we have to deploy platforms that permit us to minimize the portfolio risk, in order to know exactly what production should be." For us, knowing the production is a condition.

We have to know production, and we have to know exactly the production that we're promising to sell to the market.

The business strategy is to manage centrally and operate locally. IT had to follow the strategy. Our main IT platforms are developed with the objective to be global. Global doesn’t mean managing everything centralized, but to manage the IT platform as centralized, because it's better for synergies and in terms of costs. But, because we have to fit local needs, we we have to localize these platforms in 16 countries.

For PPM, as well, we decided to have a global, centralized, unique platform, in order to gather and collect all the data that we get from the field. This is one of the problems that we frequently have because, in effect, the operation is located everywhere. And, it’s not easy to collect information from each field operation.

It’s important to have global IT platforms, because one of our main objectives is that all our people have to work in the same way.

We have lot of plants in the middle of nowhere -- in the middle of the Nevada desert and in the middle of the Mato Grosso in Brazil. We have to gather information from these plants. So, it’s important to have global IT platforms, because one of our main objectives is that all our people have to work in the same way.

It’s also important to set the main goal of the PPM solution. Now, the PPM solution lets Enel Green Power manage its own worldwide portfolio initiatives, both business development side and the plant construction Phase 2, because we have to remember that the business development hands over the construction of the project.

We have to do it through building a unique centralized integrated platform, valuable to all the countries, designed to certify the market value of the pipeline and the potential future production related to that pipeline. For us, it's absolutely important to forecast better, to make budgets, and so on. It had to be designed to support people, our colleagues, in activities like planning, project development, reporting, document management, and so on.

Setting the main goals

So when we decided to deploy this platform, we had a lot of work for a couple of reasons.

First of all, because we wanted to develop an integrated in-house platform in order to map the ... core processes of the project, and at the same time to implement algorithms to develop a portfolio evaluation.

The second was to investigate adopting a standard solution available on the market that allowed us, with little customization, to fit the need of the business. It's important to underline that, when we started this project, it was the end of May, 2010. We already knew we were going to have an IPO. We didn’t know the time exactly, but we had to be ready for the end of October, the estimated date of the IPO.

We adopted the HP solution, because the HP people convinced us that with a minimal set of customization we would be ready for the end of October -- and we did it.

We chose HP because of the ... strong automation in the collection of the data. As I said before, also important for us were simplicity and flexibility. Also, with reference to our geographical distribution everywhere, the adoption of a solution supported with global support was another constraint and was absolutely important.

We needed a standard technology accessible from a lot of countries and with integration with other applications that we have, for example Microsoft Project. We also required scalability and platform growth -- and HP has a strength on this point -- because we are adopting a web service architecture. And, we wanted the viability of a unique homogenous view of mandating KPIs.

For us, the flexibility was one of the three main strengths on this platform and the reasons we chose HP.

We're only in the first phase in order to support the IPO and to support the certification of the market value of the pipeline. But, the main benefits of this platform for the business are acquisition and centralization of the data.

For us, the flexibility was maybe one of the three main strengths on this platform and the reasons we chose HP. But, the best one, as I said before, was the minimum customization we needed in order to fit the first phase. It’s not easy to have only three months time to set 64 workflows, because the local business development wants to fit their workflow on these needs.

It’s important for the automation to monitor all the steps of the workflow, of the individual steps of the process, to manage the workflow authorization of the individual steps, and monitor progress of the individual steps. All these data have to support us in order to plan the strategy. So, there are plenty of benefits and maybe more benefits in the future with the evolution of this platform.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.

You may also be interested in:

• HP Software GM Jonathan Rende on how ALM enables IT to modernize businesses faster
  
• HP rolls out ALM 11 in Barcelona to expand managed automation for modern applications
• HP's new ALM 11 helps guide IT through shifting landscape of modern application development
  
• Dave Shirk details how HP's Instant-On Enterprise initiative takes aim at shifting demands on business and governments
  
• New book explores automating the managed applications lifecycle to accelerate delivery of business applications

HP Software GM Jonathan Rende on how ALM enables IT to modernize businesses faster

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.

Barcelona -- Welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast from the HP Software Universe 2010 Conference in Barcelona, an interview with Jonathan Rende, Vice President and General Manager for Applications Business at HP Software.

We're here the week of November 29, 2010 to explore some major enterprise software and solutions, trends and innovations, making news across HP’s ecosystem of customers, partners, and developers. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, moderated the discussion just after the roll-out of HP’s big application lifecycle management (ALM) news, the release of ALM 11. [See more on HP's new ALM 11 offerings.]

Here are some excerpts:

Rende: Over the last 25 years that I've been in the business, I've seen two or three such waves [of applications refresh] happen. Every seven to 10 years, the right combination of process and technology changes come along, and it becomes economically the right thing to do for an IT organization to take a fresh look at their application portfolio.

What’s different now than in the previous couple of cycles is that there is no lack of business applications out there. With those kind of impacts and requirements and responsibilities on the business, the agility and innovation of an application, is now synonymous with the agility and innovation of the applications themselves in the business.

It’s not really the case that the people building, provisioning, testing, and defining the applications are lacking or don’t know what they're doing. It’s mostly that the practices and processes they're engaged in are antiquated.

What I mean by that is that today, acquiring or delivering applications in a much more agile manner requires a ton more collaboration and transparency between the teams. Most processes and systems supporting those processes just aren’t set up to do that. We're asking people to do things that they don’t have the tools or wherewithal to complete.

Lifecycle roles

Not only are we bringing together -- through collaboration, transparency, linking, and traceability -- the core app lifecycle roles of business analysts, quality performance, security professionals, and developers, but we're extending that upstream to program management office and project managers. We're extending it upstream to architects. Those are very important constituents upstream who are establishing the standards and the stacks and the technologies that will be used across the organization.

Likewise, downstream, we're extending this to the areas of service management and service mangers who sit on help desks who need to connect. Their lifeblood is the connection with defects. Similarly, people in operations who monitor applications today need to be linked into all the information coming upstream along with those dealing with change and new releases happening all the time.

[ALM advances] extend upstream much further to a whole group of people -- and also downstream to a whole group of audiences.

Number one, they need to be able to share important information. There’s so much change that happens from the time an application project or program begins to the time that it gets delivered. There are a lot of changing requirements, changing learnings from a development perspective, problems that are found that need to be corrected.

All of that needs to be very flexible and iterative. You need those teams to be able to work together in very short cycles, so that they can effectively deliver, not only on time, but many times even more quickly than they did in the past. That’s what’s needed in an organization.

There isn’t a single IT organization in the world that doesn’t have a mixed environment, from a technology perspective.

On top of that, there isn’t a single IT organization in the world that doesn’t have a mixed environment, from a technology perspective. Most organizations don’t choose just Visual Studio to write their applications in -- or just Java. Many have a combination of either of those, or both of those, along with packaged applications off-the-shelf.

So, one of the big requirements is heterogeneity for those applications, and the management of those applications from a lifecycle approach should be accommodating of any environment. That’s a big part of what we do.

You have to be able to maintain and manage all of the information in one place, so that it can be linked, and so you can draw the right, important information in understanding how one activity affects another.

But that process, that information that you link, has to be independent of specific technology stacks. We believe that, over the past few years, not only have we created that in our quality solutions, in our performance solutions, but now we have added to that with our ALM 11 release -- the same concepts but in a much broader sense.

Integrating to other environments

By bringing together those core roles that I mentioned before, we've been able to do that from a requirements perspective, independent of [deployment] stack -- and from a development environment. We integrate to other environments, whether it’s a Microsoft platform, a Java platform, or from CollabNet. The use-cases that we've supported work in all of those environments very tightly -- between requirements and tests -- and pull that information all together in one place.

A business analyst or a subject matter expert who is generating requirements, captures all that information from what he hears of what’s needed, the business processes that need to built, the application, and the way it should work. He captures all of that information, and it needs to reside in one single place. However, if I'm a developer, I need to work off of a list of a set of tasks that build to those requirements.

It’s important that I have a link to that. It’s important that my priorities that I put in place then map to the business needs of those requirements. At the same time, if I'm in quality-, performance-, and security-assurance, I also need to understand the priority of those.

So, while those requirements will fit in one place, they'll change and they'll evolve. I need to be able to understand how that impacts my test plans that I am building.

With ALM 11, we're already seeing returns where organizations are able to cut the delivery time, the time from the inception of the project to the actual release of that project, by 50 percent.

If you look at some of the statistics that are thrown around from third parties that do this research on an annual basis: In almost two-thirds of projects today, application projects still fail. Then, you look at what benefits can be put in place, if you put together the right kind of an approach, system, and automation that supports that approach.

Cutting cost of delivery

We're seeing organizations similarly cut the cost of releasing an application, that whole delivery process -- cut the cost of delivery in half. And, that’s not to mention side benefits that really have a far more reaching impact later on, identifying and eliminating on creation up to 80 percent of the defects that would typically be found in production.

With ALM 11, we're already seeing returns where organizations are able to cut the delivery time, the time from the inception of the project to the actual release of that project, by 50 percent.

As a lot of folks who are close to this will know, finding a defect in production can be up to 500 times more expensive to fix than if you address it when it’s created during the development and the test process. Some really huge benefits and metrics are already coming from our customers who are using ALM 11.

Again, if you go back to the very beginning topic that we discussed, there isn’t a business, there isn’t a business activity, there isn’t a single action within corporate America that doesn’t rely on applications. Those applications -- the performance, the security, and the reliability of those systems -- are synonymous with that of the business itself.

If that’s the case, allowing organizations to deploy business critical processes in half the time, at half the cost, at a much higher level of quality, with a much reduced risk only reflects well on the business, and it’s a necessity, if you are going to be a leader in any industry.

There are so many different options of how people can deploy or choose to operate and run an application -- and those options are also available in the creation of those applications themselves. ALM 11 runs through on-premise deployment, or also through our software as a service (SaaS), so will allow flexibility.

Deep software DNA

Software and our software business are increasingly important. If you look at the leadership within the company today, our new CEO has a very deep software DNA. Bill Veghte, who came in from Microsoft, has 20 plus years. The rest of the leadership team here also has 20 plus years in enterprise software.

Aside from the business metrics that are so beneficial in software versus other businesses, there is just a real focus on making enterprise software one of the premier businesses within all of HP. You're starting to see that with investments and acquisitions, but also the investment in, more importantly, organic development and what’s coming out.

So, it’s clearly top of list and top of mind when it comes to HP. Our new CEO, Leo Apotheker, has been very clear on that since he came in.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.

You may also be interested in:

• HP rolls out ALM 11 in Barcelona to expand managed automation for modern applications
• HP's new ALM 11 helps guide IT through shifting landscape of modern application development
  
• Dave Shirk details how HP's Instant-On Enterprise initiative takes aim at shifting demands on business and governments
  
• New book explores automating the managed applications lifecycle to accelerate delivery of business applications