Pipeline Q&A: HP

Mr. Todd DeLaughter is Vice President and General Manager for HP's Management Software Organization, part of its Software Global Business Unit. DeLaughter is responsible for delivering HP's management software solutions for the Adaptive Enterprise and has overall business accountability for the management software business, including strategy and business planning, acquisitions, strategic partners, operations, marketing and R&D. Under his leadership, HP has fortified its software portfolio by partnering, building new capabilities and through seven acquisitions. Previously, DeLaughter headed up the worldwide HP OpenView marketing and operations functions. DeLaughter is a former board member of the TeleManagement Forum.

Pipeline: HP – A Model for OSS Consolidation?

For an issue focused on industry consolidation, it seemed sensible to feature HP. One of the OSS sector's most significant players, HP is also one of its stealthiest marketers. With more than 400 installations with major carriers worldwide, however, HP cannot and should not be overlooked. In this Q&A, Pipeline discusses HP's OSS business and why it's strategically important to such a large and diverse company. We also delve into HP's views on a consolidated OSS sector, what role it might play as consolidator, and how it is working to help its carrier customers eliminate the “intregration tax.” What is revealed is the extent of HP's offerings and the fact that its OSS business provides a model that many ambitious, acquisitive OSS vendors hope to replicate. Pipeline had the good fortune to chat with Todd DeLaughter, the vice president and general manager responsible for HP's global management software organization – including telecom carriers and enterprises across the range of industries HP serves.

Pipeline: HP has a much larger and broader business than the typical OSS provider. How does a relatively small segment like OSS applications become strategically important to a massive company like HP?

DeLaughter: If you look at the hardware business, it is massive compared to software. But hardware is moving to industry standard platforms. One way HP can continue to differentiate is through things like software. Software is, in fact, one of HP’s biggest strategic focus areas and our investment in software has increased substantially in the last 18 months. HP is aligning its sales force around vertical sectors, and the network service provider vertical is the largest. Now, specific to OSS – having a vertical product aimed at the OSS space provides our sales teams with the ability to talk to network service providers about long term strategic relationships. It gives our sales force an entrée to have a more meaningful discussion with our customers.

Pipeline: HP’s “Adaptive Enterprise” effort shares many ideas with the TMF’s “lean operator” concept. Can you explain “Adaptive Enterprise” and give us an example of where carriers are following it?

DeLaughter: Adaptive Enterprise is a vision of how we get our customers to link their infrastructure to their business so they can capitalize on change. The idea is to be able to change in dynamic ways in real time and change infrastructure capabilities. It answers questions like how an OSS environment can cope with that level of change, and how to prioritize activities and keep the revenue flowing. I came from the Compaq side of the business…the push to “Adaptive Enterprise” is actually taking what TMF has already done to form something similar for enterprise IT. We’re active on the TMF board and the person who [helps define the adaptive enterprise approach] is very informed about the tie-ins you’re referring to. From a pure OSS perspective, we have an integrated framework called ISM. We don’t cover all of the functional blocks in OSS, but we cover many of them. What we don’t want is to do custom integrations, so we come in with a pre-packaged solution.

Two example where carriers are using adaptive enterprise are Colombia Movil and Swisscom. Colombia Movil entered as a new start up and went to 250,000 subscribers in one month. Its architecture is based on an ISM infrastructure, with a TIBCO messasge bus, a number of OpenView components and some partner solutions. This was a green field opportunity, but a lot can change when you're growing at that rate and that's where the ISM architecture played an important roll. At Swisscom they were having trouble managing their workforce efficiently and delivering strong background information for SLA management. We were able to offer them a complete solution to manage their services from end to end.

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