Live Blog: HP Global Partner Conference 2013

Big data, mobility and cloud eras area changing everything.

The human experience and technology are coming together rapidly.

Two major themes: We are an engineering company at heart. Innovation is what we’re all about. We also focus on the reality of IT. Power, space, management.

Primary focus for this session is converged infrastructure.

We invented converged infrastructure. We are a portfolio company.

Many have tried to copy us. Dell. Well, actually there are very few are portfolio companies like us.

We’ve got teams that work for the same company. It’s absurd to think an industry consortium could pull this off. (The VAR Guy’s spin: Sounds like a jab at VCE from Cisco, VMware and EMC).

IT at end of this decade will be about the real-time activation of services.

Big Bring Your Own Device theme.

HP insists legacy networks are not prepared for BYOD

All HP rivals have separate wired and wireless networks, she asserted. Rival solutions can’t let you manage BYOD across wired and wireless systems, she added.

A range of new wired and wireless switches can all be managed from a single system. It’s the 830 Unified wired-WLAN switch. Also, check out the Unified Wired-WLAN 10500/7500 module as well as the 2920 series switches and Wi-Fi Clear Connect.

Benefits to customers involve simplicity, scalability and security for BYOD solution.

New blades future-proofs existing customers and new customers.

Location intelligence: IT admins now know where the blades are in the rack, in the data center, etc.

New Virtual Connect 4.0 firmware software offers end-to-end network integration with real-time monitoring.

“We ship more blades than IBM, Cisco and Dell combined.”

Shipped more than 3 million blade systems.

He’s making the case that legacy storage systems aren’t ready for mobile, social, big data and cloud.

“All of these challenges are things that HP has addressed” with HP Converged Storage, he asserted.

FY12: Converged storage portfolio up 38 percent YoY.

New HP StoreSystem: For both real-time storage and backup. Channel-only offering.

New HP StoreVirtual: Software-defined storage as a virtual storage appliance. Can be deployed as virtual machine on any x86 server.

New HP Proactive Insight Experience. The VAR Guy’s spin: Sounds like an HP managed service that can be extended out to channel partners and MSPs. Potential 50 percent reduction in service call times.

New Mobility Connectivity Services: This involves assessment, deployment and support to optimize infrastructure for BYOD. Potential to deliver 90 percent fewer trouble tickets.

You have to be an HP partner to plug into those services, Neri told The VAR Guy in a follow-up Q&A. There’s a portal for the partners to monitor and it can integrate with ticketing systems though he didn’t mention specific ticketing tickets. More than 2,500 partners are Service One authorized. It can monitor more than EMC, Cisco and others.

Wireless and wired networks with BYOD: Mayer points to growing wireless market and leadership in Gartner Magic Quadrant. Fully 100 percent of revenue in wireless goes through channel, she asserted.

Blade Servers: Smith points to “massive opportunity” for HP and partners in blade servers, calling it a $37 billion opportunity. He might have mentioned that two-thirds of HP blade revenues involve the channel; checking stats.

HP Converged Storage: Scott said 60 to 70 percent of HP Storage sales involve partners. The HP Converged Storage business is an $18 billion opportunity, he asserted. HP has sold and deployed more than 150,000 virtual storage appliances.

HP Services: Neri In the past three years, revenue run rate through the channel has increased more than 20 percent.

HP Converged Storage vs EMC: Scott said HP is delivering enterprise solutions at a mid-range price. No way EMC will do that, he asserted.

Networking: Mayer and DeWitt said networking is now about elegance and single pane of glass. It’s about simplicity that Cisco can’t match, she asserted — while pointing to a combined wired-wireless infrastructure appoint. Cisco has 27 different network management platforms she asserted.

Servers: DeWitt said … “We are a PhD when it comes to compute. It’s not commoditized. It’s not a pizza box in an enclosure. It’s a science.” Smith added that HP is providing true future-proof for customers whereas key rival IBM does not. Cisco has 2 percent of the market and a real scale perspective, Smith added. Also, the Cisco architecture doesn’t allow scale of management, he asserted.