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So, HP, What Exactly Are You Trying To Sell Us?
billtom writes "There's an article over at c|net news where the normally fawning technology business press actually takes an HP VP to task for the extremely vague statements that usually surround enterprise software 'products.' With some gems like 'That could be boilerplate applying to any company,' and 'But again, how does that differ from what's been around?' and 'But hasn't that always been the goal?'" I'd like to see Charles Cooper interview whoever came up with .Net, too.
Every software company is guilty of this. A program that does general ledger and billing sounds much sexier when called a "best-of-breed integrated calculation solution, designed to drive your business into the 21st century and beyond." And a server-monitoring tool sounds better when you call it a "proactive fault-finding and troubleshooting environment, making your data center fully autonomic and self-healing."
It's kind of wierd for the press to actually start asking hard questions. Think tanks like Gartner et al live and die by techno-hype. The latest thing going around in CIO-land is Utility Computing, so we'll see what comes of that.
I think they are trying to do what IBM is doing. If you think of the climate today, all companies are trying to shed costs and stop spending. When I see the IBM adds it makes me feel as if to accomplish the goals of becoming profitable in a recession I must keep purchasing enterprise level hardware and software. To some part that is true. As an engineer I know when IT departments make poor choices due to budget contraints because they have no money to spend. As a consumer I do the same. I may choose to hold off buying new tires today for another month. In my persoanl life that is acceptable. In a professional world somethimes you have to spend regardless of freezes on bugets. There are are no other ways to succeedd at a plan unless you add to your infastructure. I think that is the point that IBM is trying to drive home. Even though you are tight you still have to remeber you must spend money to make it.
Chris
Except they didn't even make it!
.Net or JSEE without bias, she says.
.Net. You've still got to write it. You've still got to implement the business logic. They'll just help you figure out how to layer your hardware and your apps, I suppose. Stuff you probably should have learned in school.
She's talking about selling advice, basicly. They'll recommend stuff, and they're not tied down to any one technology, she says. I'm sure they'll recommend HP hardware, but they'll also recommend
It sounds like a shift towards a consulting/service business model as hardware becomes a commodity. They're trying to package it like it's a Product, but when questioned, they have to say it's a Goal or a Mindset or a Process.
It's advice. It's probably biased. And while it's probably better than what you'd get from a dozen O'reilly books at a tenth of a percent of the cost, it's not a magic box that you plug in so no one has to code anymore. It's not a secret technology that lets you turn a dial from '5 day delay' to '1 minute delay.' It's JSEE or
I swear, this has become almost an urban legend on Slashdot. Ha, ha, .NET is vaporware and doesn't mean anything. Yeah, we get it.
Of course, while I sit here developing both web-based and thick client applications and architecture using the .NET platform, I wonder why there has to be so much confusion about what .NET is. Whenever I get into a discussion about .NET with the Slashbots, I usually find that they have precisely zero exprience with it.
So just remember that while you are chuckling in your parent's basement about not understanding the .NET platform, there are people out here using it to create software (and God forbid, making money too!)
Forget the whales - save the babies.
The slashdot article makes it sound pretty bad, and admittedly c|net doesn't make it look great (honestly I thought this was a case of a bad interviewer, not a good one). However, this is not really that bad.
AE is more just a term to associate with a different way of looking at the enterprise. While, it is not terribly different from what went on before, it is an evolutionary change. As the HP VP says, it's not a product or a technology, just a way of looking at using technology in an Enterprise.
I can tell you in the Enterprise space 10 years ago, folks used to get excited about being able to add new products to their IT systems within 6 months (I kid you not). The notion of AE is that it should be measured in days. I'm sure some day it'll be down to hours or even minutes.
Traditional Enterprise systems were increadibly static and rigid, and over time they are evolving to be much more dynamic and malleable. While this is nothing new to tech folks like us, it's a bit of a wake up call to the business folks who are just getting used to implications of how to mix business and IT based on how things were 5 years ago.
Again as the VP says, it's not that you can't work towards AE without HP. You can go to anybody for it. His claims about HP's uniqueness are another story (let's face it, all that can be unique when you're talking about providing expertise to execute on an abstract busines strategy is the brand name, and the trust/confidence associated with it).
So yeah, on one hand it is marketing BS, but on the other hand you need a marketing message in order to communicate to business folks how IT capabilities have evolved and how they can go beyond the existing set of limitations they have come to expect of IT.
sigs are a waste of space
If I say something is unclear, generally, I mean "It is unclear to me." I believe that's true of, oh, everyone, when they say that something is unclear.
So, I feel obliged to ponder: How do YOU disagree with my opinion that something is unclear?
Especially when I'm interviewing you saying, in essence, "What the heck is this about?"
I guess I just hate marketing people.
this is at the core of what's wrong with buzzwords. they start as meaningful and then get hijacked by the marketing department and media and are bled dry of all content.
witness "enterprise". back in the day of "client server" computing it was realized that there were environments that were so big that each server was the client of other servers and the peer to yet more. clusters of lans in wans that were themselves clustered. do describe the feudal structure that was built to accomodate this size and complexity of network, we came up with a word: enterprise.
of course, marketing realized that since enterprise-class products were the most expensive they should really work at making sure everybody felt they had to have them. a buzzword got born by the appropriation of a valid term and now i can buy an "enterprise desktop" solution for numerous products. "enterprise desktop"? what the hell is that? marketing, m'lad, marketing.
anyway. glad to see someone call the sales team on their buzzwordery. if we want to protect the meaning of our tech descriptions we'll have to fight the sales team for them - or stick to six-letter acronyms that they won't want (call the vpn the "iskampd" box fr instance)
2 1337 4 u!
The VP's real problem is her attitude to information that suggests potential customers don't understand what the hell their AE angle is supposed to be about. When prompted that no customers understood Carly's presentation, she said she thought the customers were wrong and that she thought it was very clear.
While kissing the boss's ass is usually a good thing, it doesn't matter how clear you think something is - if the customers don't understand it, it's NOT CLEAR. And that's the bottom line.
The interviewer was a good litmus for that too. He is (presumably) somewhat well versed in IT, had the benefit of asking follow-up questions, and still couldn't figure out what the hell HP is doing. Not good for HP.
Really, the HP crowd give the impression that they've talked this up so much between each other that it must be gold. Sounds like some serious groupthink. They think they've got this great operation defined by killer buzzwords, we think they're an IBM knockoff with a bad PR campaign.
If you ask me, it sounds like .Net all over again. What the hell was .Net? I still don't know. They need to learn from IBM - clearly explained yet funny commercials. IBM's commercials tell me their software puts customer data together. HP's tell me that vigilante plus-signs put bad guys in jail. How? I dunno.
And that's a problem for HP.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
You ought to be modded +5 Insightful on that one. As a professional developer, I'm sick of PHB's buying into the white-shoed-salesman jargon. At JPMorgan Chase, my PHB bought a $200,000 "system" from Cisco for handling customer service team e-mails. When it failed miserably, I and another developer wrote an SMTP front end in a matter of weeks (our time cost JMPC $7200) and it had more features.
Our manager asked why we didn't mention we could do that before, which shocked me. My response was that he never mentioned this new "system" until it was already paid for. We were his programmers, and this was a programming issue. In the future he should consider talking to his programmers before he spent massive sums on ideas.
He's since been fired.
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
I said this two years ago when I first heard about the HP Compaq merger. HP has strengths that Compaq could not make better (calculators, printing, medical and engineering diagnostic tools come to mind).
These companies also had severe weaknesses (desktop PCs and x86 servers) that the merger only made worse. Can anyone point to a product or service from either company that became stronger/better with the merger?
Instead of spewing buzzwords, this VP should step aside and let engineers run HP the way it was run in the past. Carly and Co. are so fixated on the boring low-margin businesses (PC based stuff) that they are ruining the company. It happened to SGI and now it's happening to HPQ. Stay away from this company while Carly and Co. are running it. They can't beat Dell or IBM.
I hate to spring to the defense of Big Corporations, but it's really not that hard to interpret Marketsp'aek positively:
:)
"I define AE as a business strategy for customers who want to respond in real time to changes affecting their business."
My translation: AE is (an expensive product which helps companies setup) a business strategy under which trends trigger actions. The use of 'business strategy' sounds meaningless, but it's actually two words which imply two paragraphs. 'Strategy' in this case is an overloaded term referring to a collection of tools, policies, and proceedures.
The use of 'real time' in business means something very different from its meaning in computer science. It means 'today' instead of 'eventually'. I work for a large media company with an animal for a mascot, and it takes us years to respond to changes in the marketplace. Most of our innertia is rooted in size, conservative management, and fear of risk. However, if we had a system of automation which identified potentially interesting changes in the marketplace, especially in merchandising, it could save us a lot of money.
For example, how much should we invest in online sales, and how much in more traditional sales? We make money from both, now, so it's a very serious question. A missed sale is a lost sale, but there's no point in trying to extract blood from a turnip. We have people who try to figure out where the tastiest blood is, but they are limited by their tools and proceedures. This AE might actually be just the thing they need.
I don't know if AE is any good, or if it's what it claims to be, but I do know that marketing speak CAN have a real meaning in a marketing context. When we geeks ridicule the suits for talking gibberish, it's no better than when they ridicule us for our acronyms, l33t, tech talk and other not-quite-english that we use. "We aggregate packet-based transactions, over-selling a large pipe to small nodes who could collectively saturate that pipe, but in practice don't" would mean nothing to a marketing type, but to an ISP sysadmin it's her raison d'etre.
If we hope to make any progress in the things that really matter (digital freedom), we need to learn to communicate with these people. Their protocols may be bad, but it works for them, and marketing types don't have firmware upgrades, so we need to learn to speak their protocols if we hope to route any traffic through them, or to comandeer them for our noble purposes.
No, she didn't. She just kept saying "you need to tie the business to the resource". That's just as much gibberesh as anything else. What exactly am I supposed to tie to what? Applications to hardware? My business goals with IT expenditures? There is no such thing as "business" in this sense. Is your business your customers? Your shareholders? Your inventory? Your employees? Which of those am I tying to a resource? Which resource? If my business is services, then my business is my employees, but then, my resources are also my employees, so they're already tied.
It's more gibberish. And her "specific" example was not specific. She gave an example of something someone did, but she didn't provide specifics on how it got done, or how that was "tying the business to the resource".
As to automating things, no, she didn't even say that. She just basically said that HP would be willing to send lots of expensive consultings to your work to figure out how to "tie the business to the resource", but does not ever say what the heck that is, and certainly does not ever say it's automation. Companies like HP hate automation, because it leaves less room for consultants.
*GONG* Keep trying.
As a 10-year ex-HPer I'm still dissapponted that they've abandon "HP as technology company" and now have embraced "HP as a supply chain consultant". Unfortunately, supply chain management will only get commodified, and quickly. It's an unsustainable business strategy. But I've also come to realize that certain board members and executives already knew this and are only out to line their pockets before the ship goes down.
And, yes, I have an MBA.
JGski
It strikes me that this is more about branding than anything. What sets any big-name real world product apart from its identical counterpart? The brand name.
.Net bandwagon. Just as with physical products, corporations know that it's not about the quality of the product, or the list of features. It's about brand saturation and recognition. If someone sees a billboard for product A 100X more often than product B, some gullible part of his mind believes that product A is better. Who cares what it does?
Imagine an interviewer with a Nike exec, asking why consumers should pay more for their products than a functionally equivalent (maybe even better-built) shoe. I doubt the suit would even acknowledge such a question as being valid. It is not a question companies feel obligated to answer.
It seems that software companies are behind the game with respect to their peers in tangible goods in this aspect, but expect to see a lot more of this stuff. It sounds to me like HP is really just beginning to construct their own
You drank my drink, you drunk!
Recognizing that you have experience I do not (no, I don't have an MBA), what sociological or psychological message are they sending? When MBAs talk to these folks, what do they understand that I, with my Electrical Engineering background, just don't get?
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
I think all this clamor over the way Nora has presented HP's AE exposes the void between management and IT people. The people that have the potential and desire (not to mention the need) to understand what a system like "Adaptive Enterprise" actually is are not the people in charge of whether or not a company is going to adopt that system.
While HP has made mistakes, they are by no means a stupid company. They pay people a lot of money to tell them what they need to say to make anything sound good. And they know that by using this vague and seemingly cutting-edge vocabulary in their speeches that its going to appeal to those who make the decisions about what sort of system they need to use (IE not engineers working in the IT dept).
This interview is unique in that a top-ranking VP from HP was forced to answer some technical questions about the way her product works. She probably has no idea how AE works, and you couldn't explain it to her in terms she understands because like many others have said she doesn't understand "tech talk". What she does understand is what to tell the people in charge to get them to buy into her idea. That's her job. When they get a company interested and go to close the sale, they probably send a few techies along with some salespeople to explain to some managers IT pet that their product really is worth it.
I personally think this interview was unfair. It would be like interviewing a programmer at microsoft about what he see's for the future of the company, what directions they are taking, etc... He'd probably be just as dumbfounded. Before the interview, it even says "CNET News.com recently met with Nora Denzel, senior vice president of HP's Adaptive Enterprise, to find out what she sees on the IT horizon from the computing giant's perspective." I dont recall anything in the interview regarding the future of HP and where they want to go, but instead trying to bleed technical details out of a marketing rep.
The article should have been titled "Investigation into the details of HP's new Adaptive Enterprise Solutions" and then maybe HP would have been given a fair chance to represent themselves.