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ANN LIVERMORE
HP BladeSystem c-Class launch Web event
Palo Alto, California
June 14, 2006
© Copyright 2006 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P
All rights reserved. Do not use without written permission from HP.
Hello, everybody. It's nice to have you here with us today. I want to welcome all of you who are here with us in Palo Alto at our headquarters, and also the thousands of customers and media and partners and analysts that we have participating with us via the live Webcast.
In our industry, you're used to seeing lots of product launches, and it's pretty commonplace. But today we're going to do something that's quite different, and we're going to introduce something that is very different. We're going to introduce to you today a breakthrough architecture.
We've taken the very best technologies from across HP, ranging from technologies we use in our leading NonStop servers, to technologies we use in our printers. We've brought them together in a fundamentally different way. And what we've been able to do is to create an architecture, a new computing paradigm, that's going to completely change the way customers are able today to manage and operate their environments.
We've implemented a very simple out-of-the-box kind of design. And what this new system will do is let customers dramatically reduce the installation time and also the operation cost. On top of that, it removes barriers to change, which is one of the things our customers really complain about in today's racked, stacked, wired datacenters. This new architecture is going to drive a new agenda to blade everything. And what it does is to integrate the networking, the power and cooling, and the management.
We've leveraged the very best resources we have, and we do believe that this is going to revolutionize the way businesses can run and the way they can use their IT.
According to IDC, over the next five years, corporations are going to spend three times more on the management and operation of their IT environment than they spend on the acquisition of the technology itself. Three times more. And that's no good.
Many companies have tried to address that by reducing IT labor costs - offshoring, using labor arbitrage - and while that may help some, it does not solve the fundamental problem. The fundamental problem is that the technology itself needs to be more self-sufficient. And it needs to require much less labor to manage and operate.
In response to this problem that our customers all feel, there have been lots of promises that the IT industry has made of how things are going to be better in the future. Our customers don't have to wait because we can deliver that to them today. We can deliver things that are going to create a real savings in their IT operations cost and their management cost because we're going to dramatically be able to help them change the way they build out and run IT.
Our customers have been asking for this. They want to move from the high-cost islands of automation that they have today to an environment where it's lower cost, where it's automated, where it runs 24/7, where it runs in a lights-out manner, and where the IT resources are pooled so that they can be shared more effectively. This is the essence of the whole next generation datacenter, and we're delivering it through HP's Adaptive Infrastructure.
We'll deliver to people a lower cost of operation and also a higher quality of service both at the same time. And on top of that, they're going to be able to have a much faster ability to change to keep in line with the business changes that they face.
HP is one of the only companies on the planet that has both the scope and the scale to be able to bring all these things together. And only HP can do it in a fundamentally different way. If you look at what's required:
- You need to have very energy-efficient, industry-standard building blocks that can be created and sold at a very low unit cost.
- You then need to be able to have unified infrastructure management to manage all the components, and have the security built in.
- And finally, on top of that, you need to be able to have the capability to virtualize these IT pools, and then to be able to automatically redeploy IT resources.
Many customers are already starting to realize some of these benefits. And we are lucky to have today three of our customers with us who have been working with HP around this. And I'd like to take just a moment to recognize them: Cerner, Sodexho, and also the Screen Actors Guild in the front row here. Please raise your hands.
We're here today to announce the keystone in our Adaptive Infrastructure offering. This is the HP BladeSystem c-Class. I love this product.
This thing is a big announcement in a very small package. And you'll be able to see and hear the customer impact that this is going to create. What we've introduced to you today is an Adaptive Infrastructure that comes in a 17-inch box. It contains some of the world-leading technologies and some of the greatest innovations that we've pulled from across our company. And when compared to a rack-mounted system, we believe that our customers are going to be able to save almost 50 percent over a three-year period in the cost of the machine and the operation associated with it. Almost 50 percent. That is huge.
You're going to be able to see:
- up to 41 percent savings on the acquisition cost of the product itself.
- 60 percent on the datacenter facilities.
- And when you look at the initial setup costs, a dramatic reduction of up to 96 percent.
Those are huge numbers, and very meaningful to people running an overall IT environment.
So how are we going to do this? What is it we're going to do? We've invested in three key areas where HP has strengths and depth that no one else can match. First, our customers asked for very simple management. So what we did was we worked with HP's Imaging and Printing Group, which makes the best consumer and business printers in the world. They create them. They design them. The best in the world.
So we said, "We want to make this system as simple as our customers see the printers. We should be able to address problems here as easily as the customer can fix a paper jam on a printer." And we designed in a two-inch screen that speaks to that level of simplicity.
You combine that with our Insight Control management software, and again these are the two sets of technology breakthroughs that really drive the simplification of the management and the cost reduction.
To achieve the breakthrough in virtualization, what we did was we took technologies from our NonStop computers, and have used those in this new offering, our new blades offering. We took the HP Virtual Connect architecture and it's at the guts of this differentiation in virtualization. It allows us to be able to have customers wire their systems once and then be able to make changes on the fly.
And then our customers also had asked us to help them be able to conserve energy. When you have a very densely packed computing environment, you have to worry about power and cooling. We've put together a team across HP called the HP Cool Team. This was a company-wide effort of our leading technologists, and we asked them to rethink completely how blades are powered and cooled. And what they've been able to do is to create some technology very unique to HP called our HP Thermal Logic technology.
Now we've talked a lot about the technologies, but that's not the only part of the story that's really impressive. The other part is how easy it is out-of-the-box to have this system up and running. We've got our Factory Express services, which allow us to be able to integrate the HP components and also third-party components, and ship them to our customers ready to go.
We've got our HP Services that are ready today to be able to help customers with the design and deployment of the environments. On top of that, we've got channel partners all over the world that can also provide these services and sell these solutions.
For customers who want financing, we can provide that. And as you might bet, we have a special program for those customers who want to trade in their IBM environment and instead move to the new HP c-Class. Or for customers who want to migrate and move from their current environment with HP, we can provide financing there.
In addition, we have promised our customers that we will continue to stand behind our current HP BladeSystem.
So we've made a commitment:
- to continue with our product line activities today
- to continue selling the current products through 2007
- and to continue supporting them through 2012.
And this is something that customers love about HP.
We've teamed with the best people in the industry to bring real solutions to the market today. So you'll see us with solutions with Oracle, Brocade, Intel, and Cisco. They're here with us today, and they're shipping and ready to deliver real solutions today.
We believe so firmly in this technology and what it will do - these solutions and what they can enable - that we're going to deploy them ourselves inside HP. Many of you may have seen the press release that Randy Mott, our CIO, has distributed about HP's internal plans to take 85 datacenters and consolidate them down to six:
- two in Houston
- two in Atlanta
- and two in Austin.
The consolidation of these datacenters and the new technologies that he's going to deploy from HP are going to save HP up to a billion dollars in costs over the next few years. And the BladeSystem is going to be at the heart of his plan to achieve this. Randy is going to deploy a large number of our industry-standard servers, including many of the new c-Class servers that we are announcing today. And he expects to gain tremendous cost savings in both installation and operations.
You will undoubtedly hear lots of noise from our competitors because we've got them a bit scared. But when you really look at what others can do:
- Dell, they lack the expertise in management, they lack the expertise in storage, and they lack the expertise in UNIX for UNIX blades.
- EMC, they don't have a volume server business, and they can't do Unified Infrastructure Management.
- If you look at Sun, they can't do any of this.
- And if you look at IBM, we leapfrog IBM on every single dimension with this announcement.
On top of all that, there's a different business model you need to have for blades. You need to be great at high-value systems because it's a high-value, high-end system. On the other hand, you have to have the cost structure to drive low-cost component leadership. HP is the company that's great at selling high-value, powerful mission-critical systems, but also knows how to play and win with low-cost, industry-standard components.
With our introduction today, we are clearly setting the agenda. We're delivering an Adaptive Infrastructure which brings real savings and it brings real solutions to our customers today.
For more information about the new BladeSystem, please visit our Website at http://www.hp.com/go/bladesystem/evaluate.
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