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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.
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
They're selling plus signs, in fact they're selling a whole bunch of plus signs. They seem to sell them in groups. they can catch criminals and make a guy get home from the moon.
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
That said, check out this gem:
He should never have needed to ask that twice. HP's response was clear to anyone who's been struggling to cultivate dynamic convergence in their disintermediate, yet robust, technologies.
I work IT for one of the lower-end Fortune 500 companies (I won't mention any names, but we're the 2nd largest manufacturer of Internet-enabled personal sanitation devices in the U.S.), and we're seriously looking at HP's AE technology for our next round of upgrades. I am so tired of having to re-virtualize all our front-end functionalities every time the boss-man wants to streamline our synergistic e-services. Now, if I simply had a frictionless front-end action-item, right there in my real-time vortal (vertical portal) I'd be made.
Anyway, Slashdotters, don't believe this CNET FUD. I think AE definitely has the potential to recontextualize the debate on revolutionary mindshare schemas.
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.
He must have gone to college with this consultant.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
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
Q: Stripped of all the jargon and market-speak, can you succinctly define what Adaptive Enterprise is supposed to be about?
A: We proudly adapt to the needs of our enterprise: namely, the CEO, the CIO, and our board members. Screw the rest of the employees and the customers. Aside from that, we really have no idea what the heck we're talking about. We need to make up big words in long sententces to justify our existence in the company. This is the same mindset that allowed us to have fantastic ideas like merging with Compaq, laying off thousands of employees, while giving Capellas the goodbye gift that one can only dream about.
Q: That could be boilerplate applying to any company. What's the special sauce?
A: The special sauce is no different than what you find in Burger King. We sit around all day long whacking off in an effort to come up with this sh--.
Q: Can't you get that by going to any reputable company out there? Sun, IBM--that's what they're about. Am I missing something here?
A: Nope. They're all the same formula. Same sauce. Right down to the last drop.
Why do they let people like this run companies, or even speak? I mean christ, MS APIs are more well-understood than that buzzword soup.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
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
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
Disclaimer: I was recently laid off as my position was outsourced to HP.
First, I don't think that the VP ever really answered the questions that were asked. I think the whole point behind trying to sell the Adaptive Enterprise is that it is not something you can clearly define. I'd hate to actually do contract negotiations with them as I'm sure both parties will have different thoughts on what is covered under HP services.
The whole line about being able to dynamically restructure your IT resources to me means HP can help you figure out how to axe 1/3rd of your workforce and still "adapt" to your business needs. As the interviewer pointed out, aligning IT with your business it nothing new. Hiring outside consultants to help do it is nothing new.
It begs the question, what is new about adaptive enterprise? Answer: Nothing. I don't see any proof that it is anything more than another marketing strategy designed to sell billable hours and support/consulting contracts.
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.
A pirate ("Arr, we'll return on yer investment, matey, just hand over the doubloons...")
A Parrot ("Squawk! Polly wants leverage, polly wants synergies leveraged, squawk!"
A dog trainer ("Sit, marketing rep! Now, demonstrate CRM, demonstrate CR- SIT! bad rep! Shame on you!")
Mr. Hainey from Green Acres ( "I bet you'll be wantin' one o' these here market share segments, to go with that product, won'cha?")
Krusty the Clown ("Hey hey!! Now 'does not cause instant bankruptcy' in every box!")
Dr. Evil ("I'll give you ten minutes to amuse me. Begin your presentation....NOW.")
Personally, i think HP is counting on non-technical word of mouth and goodwill, which is why all these ads focus on things like preserving artwork and capturing criminals- if your other managers like the HP ads, they're more likely to approve HP-related spending... and think that it's worth it, even if they don't understand the product or the language describing it.
"I'd say 'Have a good time,' but arson is still illegal.
I'd like to see Charles Cooper interview whoever came up with .Net, too.
Forget about .net. Get this guy to interview Darl.
The utility computing aspects of the 'adaptive enterprise' are quite real and you can buy it today in the form of the HP Utility Data Center. In a word, UDC is about infrastructure automation - a data center in which you can rapidly deploy (and redeploy) servers and services with no hands-on work, and not requiring you to have a huge, specialized support staff.
To really have an adaptive enterprise, you need more things layered on top of infrastructure automation, but it is a key building block. Other vendors like Sun and IBM are selling this type of concept, but I think you'll find that HP has more actual products than the competition. HP's marketing does stink though.
This looks like it came directly from the Dilbert mission statement generator.
Instead of all of this unintelligble claptrap, HP needs to devote a decent amount of concentration to their Enterprise systems division, and make some hard choices.
HP is no longer saying "bet the company" on Itanium, but currently HP-UX and VMS are totally wagered on Intel's unproven architecture.
The Alpha base has been easy pickings for Solaris and Linux, and the rest of the HP Enterprise customer base is watching as HP "burns the boats" and our systems investments vaporize.
I realize that HP believes it has sound reasons for sending PA-RISC and Alpha to sleep with the fishes, but there is currently no backup for these OS environments if Itanium fails (which looks likely).
You can't bring back the dead, but HP needs to immediately and publicly port HP-UX and VMS to the AMD Opteron, and let the customers determine which architecture will survive.
HP has been willing to engage AMD in the PC market for mostly no good purpose (the margins on these products are razor thin). If HP has braved Intel's wrath for this useless gesture, then HP should take a risk that really counts and let the market decide the fate of Itanium vs. Opteron.
HP, the choice is yours, adapt or die.
I'm not sure if it "links business processes together", but it does get quite sticky if you dont clear it up prompty when it spills.
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
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
Recently at my company we tried to contact HP for more KVM cables for our KVM switch. This is an "older" HP product. Talk about a joke trying to get the product.
Upon contact support, the only number findable on the website I was transfered to parts and spoke with someone thier. After giving the part number to the lady, she said "I don't know if we still make that product." How can the company not know if they make something anything more. It took her almost a half-hour to try and find the product or the replacement product. I finally asked her if this was because of the merger between HP and Compaq. She said yes, that it is a nightmare in the parts department because no one knows when or if they cancel a product.
I don't understand how they can run a business when no one knows what is happening in the parts department
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.
After reading that interview, I feel it's appropriate to quote Mr. T: "Ain't got TIME fo no JIBBA JABBA!"
So now the word "platform" is a buzzword?
The .NET platform includes not only the CLR, but the various servies that are used frequently by .NET like IIS, MSMQ, SQL Server, and even COM+ through Enterprise Services. These are the technologies that work very well with the .NET CLR to create distributed applications (oh no, another buzzword right?)
What do you mean by "graphics card applet" exactly? Programming certain types of applications using the .NET Framework/Platform/Whatever is not a good idea. I don't pretend that .NET is the cure-all for everything. However, for creating business process type applications, it really is a great platform to work with.
Forget the whales - save the babies.
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.
It did get slightly out of control, but calling .NET simply a "java-ish wrapper around the win32 API" is fairly inaccurate. Many of the class libraries do simply wrap the Win32 api, especially things like Windows Forms, but this is only a stopgap measure until the support is built into the OS.
Also, .NET support is being built into more products like SQLServer. The ability to create stored procs in any .NET compliant language is coming soon (Yes, I know you can write stored procs in Java in DB2 and Oracle), along with other features.
So .NET is a lot more than just the CLR and VS.NET. It is seeping into just about every Microsoft product there is. I think the marketing just came too early.
Forget the whales - save the babies.
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.
I'd like to see Charles Cooper interview whoever came up with .Net, too.
.NET is vaporware and doesn't mean anything. Yeah, we get it. "
.NET, or that it's vaporware. All he was saying is that it would be interesting to see the .NET creators interviewed. Seriously, nice strawman, dude.
.NET. After all, Microsoft likes to market it as some sort of brilliant, magic cure-all, when it's really just a repackaging of many old concepts into a nice, pretty, buzzword-compliant package.
"I swear, this has become almost an urban legend on Slashdot. Ha, ha,
Okay, care to explain to me how B follows A in this conversation? There is NOTHING about timothy's original comment that suggests he doesn't understand
Personally, I'd love to see MS taken to task over
Wow, good non-point. I take it you're one of those annoying folks who thinks everyting is too mainstream? You seem to be assuming that people only use .NET technologies because of the fancy buzzwords.
Let me guess, you hate most popular music and instead tell everyone how much you love the "Screaming Frog Orgasms", "The Wicket Pence Dog Sperms", or some other fringe group that people bring up when they want to show how elevated their tastes are?
Their Adaptive Enterprise technology is certainly impressive.
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!
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.
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!
Schnapple
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.