Slashdot Mirror
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.
I think the companies that bought into the Internet era blitz in the 90's, all thought there was a magic bullet that could rocket them to the future. The problem is, that they, like everyone else, were duped into buying hype that was based around nothing more than shallow promises of a better today.
The jargon coming from HP, is to try and market to company types with buying power, to give them a new slogan or saying that could be used to grab onto and use in the office, so that they don't have to do any work.
Scott Adams' Dilbert cartoon captures the reality of what's going on today. Executives would rather appear to be working, than actually working, so they invent new descriptions of what they are doing that sound really busy!
I think the best slogan is hard work, but nobody likes hard work, unless someone else is doing it.
From the article: "I define AE as a business strategy for customers who want to respond in real time to changes affecting their business."
Translation: We know your business operates in something called time. Time is money. We want money, so therefore we will trade you your own time for money. We accomplish this by selling you your own time back, but we change it to something called real-time. Or ideally I have no idea what those geeks in research have come up with and it's not my job to know, so I'll just make something up and hope you bite. Besides, none of the marketing based people will understand what they came up with anyway, so who cares?
HP funds the SCO Roadshow and they are also giving 24/7 support to Linux.
Yes, HP can be confusing sometimes
That said, I think utility computing is applicable only to a narrow market so far. You need compatability between various applications to host them within a single environment that shares data center resources. When I look around my company (a $1.5 billion worldwide manufacturer), for example, I see dozens of applications on several different operating systems at various versions. How does utility computing address such a heterogeneous environment?
About the only time she made sense was at the very end:
How true...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
I'd like to see Charles Cooper interview whoever came up with .Net, too.
Forget about .net. Get this guy to interview Darl.
I think I am now dumber having read that interview. Nowhere in that whole page did she say anything resembling a real thought. If I read something about "linking your business practices to your IT" again, I think I would have gone totally zombie.
Maybe that's the plan. Subliminal hypnosis. Only explanation for a CTO giving any money to HP for this pile of BS.
Oh, well, back to my own synergistic business initiatives linking IT to the customer base in a proactive fashion.
It's a strange world -- let's keep it that way
Nope... that was a good interviewer, since the questions weren't staged so the VP can answer more fluff.
;-)
;-)
Yeah, you know you are seeing an interviewer who's cutting through the fluff when the interviewer (as opposed to the interviewee) introduces terms like "special sauce" and "paradigm shift".
I drew my comments entirely from the content in that interview. What's different was that I had a clue about the subject matter, unlike the interviewer. The interviewer's agenda appears mostly to be just to make the interviewee look bad, rather than to ask probing questions.
Questions like "Is outsourcing part of AE?" are a waste of time. The question that can't be answered with more fluff would be more along the lines of: "Can you give me an example of a customer you're working with on AE, and what the impact of AE has been on their business." If they question with something like, "well, we're just starting this", than you rephrase to "what the expected impact of AE will be on their business". If they answer the question with just a cost savings number, you follow up with, "yeah, but specifically how and what did (or will) it change in terms of the company's capabilities?"
Instead this "probing" interviewer essentially walked into a quagmire of industry jargon and semantics. The interviewer didn't seem to be listening to the answers to the questions. Heck, half a dozen questions after the exec pointed out that the difference was AE and HP was not linked to a particular technology, the interviewer is still thinking in terms of differentiation based on technology.
If you look at the questions, they are mostly the kind of open ended, broadly phrased questions that cannot be answered concretely. I think my favorite was "Do you feel the message is unclear and needs rethinking?"
sigs are a waste of space
The internal codename for what became .NET was NGWS, standing for Next Generation Windows Services. Apparently one reason this codename was picked was that it was such a horrible name that it would force people to think of something better! Anyway, nothing better was found until literally the Friday before the Monday release - so .NET was chosen in rather a hurry overnight. I don't think anyone inside Microsoft (I was an intern there at the time) was particularly happy with it, but it was the best they could come up with.
The parent poster is correct. I work for a company marginally associated with this effort, and will remain anonymous, but basically HP is following IBMs lead in the autonomic computing space.
What is autonomic computing? Simply put, the desire to apply business rules to IT infrastructure. Automatically. In order to cut costs, and lay people off.
So, ultimately, the goal is to have your IT infrastructure manage itself. In the short term, that may involve integrating alerts and thier solutions across a variety of devices, so that if you get a particular error on a cisco router, the router is reconfigured automatically. Later, they would like to bring new devices onto the network, install enterprise apps on them, and let them loose - without any manual intervention.
Now, there are some serious technical and social hurdles to overcome. First, the heterogenous nature of every network makes applying the same bandaid solution to the same problem impossible across devices. Cisco gear, for example, has been made by a variety of manufacturers that Cisco has aquired throughout the years. Different MIBS, different OSes, different versions of all of the above. Its a nightmare. Thats just Cisco.
More serious is the objections of the IT staff. For good reason, NOC guys shudder at the thought of changing thier network configuration automatically, with no engineer in the loop. One configuration change can break a shitload of other functionality you depend on. How is this software supposed to account for that?
Ultimately, (yet this is what is being marketed today) strong AI will be needed to solve many these problems. Nevertheless, IBM and HP are committing billions to these efforts. Good luck, guys, you'll need it.
I will say though, if autonomic computing can at least get NOC people on the same page as the groups they serve, that would be a major breakthrough. I've been in many Fortune 500 NOCs where the NOC personal have never even met the DBAs whose boxen they look after, for example, and getting things fixed is often a case in finger pointing over email, all the while money goes down the tubes. This is not the NOC guys or the DBAs fault; its a process issue, but autonomic computing can at least force these guys to talk to each other.