HP Networking – Management For Telcos And Enterprises, Wireless For BYOD

For our assessment and forecast for the whole networking market, please click here.

HP Networking Highlights Q2 2012

• Built a large division by acquiring 3Com – adding it to its ProCurve business in 2010
• Plays in the LAN, switch and router hardware markets
• Offerings include including its FlexNetwork architecture, IMC VAN management suite and its Enterprise Mobility platform
• Has an incremental approach to extending corporate applications to mobile devices connecting to networks as part of BYOD strategies
• Takes a multi-vendor approach to the management of network devises, accommodating those from Cisco and others
• Its approach is endorsed by Wellcome Trust, a large reference customer
• Sees its role as adding IT skills to more traditional networking specialisation
• Has a good networking approach necessary to build increasingly integrated systems

We enjoyed an excellent day of presentations from HP’s David Chalmers (CTO of the EMEA networking team) in London recently. It was a chance to catch up on this group’s growing success and strategy going forward. You’ll want to learn more of how the company is positioned in this large market.
HP’s ProCurve business was enhanced by the addition of 3Com towards the end of 2010 and it now plays in wireless LAN, switch and router hardware market, while offering UC, Network Management and Network services and security appliances as part of its Tipping Point acquisition. Networking is also central to its to its Converged Infrastructure and Converged Cloud approaches. At the conference it was keen to talk the current growth in demand for Enterprise mobility and the networked enterprise of the future – the latter panel enhanced by the participation its customer Wellcome Trust.

Enhancing Enterprise Mobility Is A Necessity For The Influx Of Smart Phones And Tablets

Apple’s massive 63% revenue growth and 134 million iPhone and iPad shipments in 2011 make it easily the fastest growing hardware vendor in the Enterprise market, even if it only represents a small single digit proportion of its business. In addition the increasing growth of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies in Enterprises are seeing an influx of devices and expectations from users, especially from younger social networking employees. We rather liked the analogy the panel used of a 10-ton train bearing down on IT departments.
HP notes that smart phones and tablets only communicating via wireless networks, as they lack wired Ethernet ports. Enterprises often have little or poor wireless provision today, so mobile users can only access the Internet and email: cut off from the corporate applications, it’s akin to a speaker in a presentation who can be heard through the PA system, but can’t hear questions from those without a mic at the at the back of the auditorium.
HP has recently announced its Enterprise Mobility platform, including its HP Enterprise Mobile App Store which allows telco Service Providers and Enterprises to deliver mobile applications to users of smart phones and tablets as well as its Enterprise Mobility Gateway, which connects those devices to back-end enterprise systems.
It sees itself as the provider of the IT expertise to connect telephony with computing – subjects which are still widely separated in most large organisations: however it promotes evolutionary rather than revolutionary change here, recognising that it’s particularly difficult for organisations which have recently adopted VoIP phones as part of a Unified Communications (UC) strategy to find big budgets for yet another new direction. The many barriers to adoption for customers include financial, technical experience, legacy environment (especially in their existing service contracts), software licensing issues and the culture of the company itself. It reports that accommodating smart devices is a strong movement in the USA, with activity in Asia Pacific starting up: EMEA is expected to develop later.
It also cites advantages in the management of data on mobile devices, adding authentication and the ability to wipe corporate data when an employee leaves (or all if devices are lost). HP’s products in the wireless networking area include those which combine controllers with access points through its acquiree Columbris, which invented the technology.
HP supports applications from its new 10 year alliance with Alcatel Lucent, Presence (despite having sold its high-end Halo telepresence solution to Polycom last year) and Microsoft Lync, despite Microsoft de-emphasising it in favour of its Office 365 activities.
Customer examples of the adoption of HP mobility solutions include:

• A large bank with 100s of branches, which has introduced video booths in branches for customers to connect with mortgage loan advisors and other subject experts on an ad hoc basis; the advantages of using UC in this case include reducing its expert workforce through greater productivity and improving customer access to its services
• An airline distribution hub, where it’s helped speed up refuelling by adding data about tanker availability to dispatchers through Wi Fi and 3G connections to smart tablets in vehicles
• It also helped Charthouse school build sFlow into its wireless access points, allowing it to monitor activity without having to force all communications through a single controller; the school manages to monitor PC activity, advising pupils when they find their machines are infected with viruses

Other examples include adding the ability to find wheel chairs and other equipment in hospitals.
We’re a long way from UC through mobile devices becoming the new dial tone in Enterprises, but there are major opportunities for those organisations that extend their support for smart devices beyond just email and the Internet. The advantages are obvious in increasing productivity, moving away from static locations for the use of specific corporate applications. Early adopters may also find that they become more attractive as employers for Generation Y users with BYODs, who often get frustrated in having to come to terms with old-fashioned computing.

The Enterprise Network Of The Future

In the conference HP addressed this issue with a panel including a representative from the Wellcome Trust charity. It coincided with its introduction of its (rather awkwardly named) Intelligent Management Center Virtual Appliance (IMC VAN) Network Management Module which runs on top of its FlexNetwork architecture. This includes pre-defined templates for use by server admin staff to create profiles for application developers and the ability to create policy servers. The software can be used as a plug-in for virtualisation management products such as VMware’s vCenter. When developing the software HP debated classifying IMC VAN as a ‘network hypervisor’, since it is effectively end-to-end control panel connecting branches and the centre and is part of a UC deployment. Using it avoids managing the network device by device, automating the orchestration to save time. In the end it decided against the hypervisor naming, not least because the software does a lot more than that in its opinion.
The Enterprise network of the future contains lots of automation and simplification: it also should allow devices from multiple vendors to be managed from a single pane of glass in HP’s view, which is coloured off course by its decision to move away from using Cisco networking when it bought 3Com. Although there is some debate about whether or not Cisco allows it to maintain products supporting new interfaces, HP successfully manages many alongside its own and networking vendors with which it has strong ongoing partnerships, such as F5 Networks. It has a testing centre in Grenoble where it runs Proof of Concept projects for customers for specific applications on multiple vendor equipment.

Wellcome Trust’s Customer View

Wellcome Trust is a charity funding research to improve human and animal health. With an endowment of around £13.9 billion, it is the United Kingdom’s largest non-governmental source of funds for biomedical research according to Wikipedia.
It is a user of HP networking and contributed some fascinating insights into its deployment, aims and experiences.
It wants choice in IT decisions and avoids being locked into a single vendor demonstrated by its deployment includes HP networking, Cisco phones and Dell servers. Our panelist needs performance, scalability and flexibility, seeing networking as a commodity area. The staff needs to be connected at all times, whether using wired or wireless devices. He recognised the importance of mobility in the panel discussion earlier in the day. He also noted that it is very hard to measure productivity and efficiency, but believes they can be improved by selecting the right equipment.
Wellcome Trust likes to have real partnerships with its chosen vendors, seeing their staff as an extension of its own IT team: they can be particularly valuable in advising how its investments in technology can be best exploited.
It values TCO and value for money as key measurements, being one of only a few companies for which moving funding from Cap Ex to Op Ex is less important. It also wants to avoid having separate specialists in servers, storage and networking if it can and wants to use automation to free up back office staff to work on front office issues, which is what a ‘value adding’ IT department should be. In terms of HP’s approach it noted that it doesn’t always have to buy its components, since it works with APIs to extend the networking of other devices to the Enterprise.
It notes that the network landscape is changing in terms of corporate awareness and the network’s criticality. Our panelist feels lucky that his CEO is personally aware of the organisation’s network.
For the future he sees networking becoming ever more important through the commoditising of IT. He sees a demand from his users for more conferencing, collaboration and streaming media to devices. For users with Blackberry phones, iPads and laptops he’s sure that they won’t want to connect them all into the network simultaneously, so it’s becoming increasingly difficult to predict the necessary bandwidth needed. He challenges vendors to optimise and make their offerings more efficient and to make their applications less bandwidth-hungry.

Some Conclusions – HP Networking Adds IT Skills To A Previously Separated technical Subject

For many years there was talk of the convergence between IT and Communications, while those looking after the 2 realms were separated within vendors and user organisations (coincidentally one reason we chose the name ‘ITCandor’ was to emphasise this in the sense ‘IT…. C…. and/or’).
Our sizing of the network hardware market identifies this as a massive market ($194 billion in 2011 revenues), with a strong division between Service Provider and Enterprise/Consumer areas. The latter area is where HP plays, but this is one of only a few hardware markets it does not lead; it prefers to quote another organisation’s sizing with different definitions which give it a bigger share; either way it’s along way behind Cisco in ours (47.6%) and quite possibly their analysis.
HP is one of many newer suppliers adding IT expertise to the networking area and helping users to converge. It demonstrates a clear understanding of the challenges to IT departments of mobility and BYOD and suggest an incremental approach to extending corporate applications to smart phones and tablets. Because it is a relatively young network vendor its UC approach is less VoIP and more IT based and it has well thought-out architectures and products to help users increase the usefulness and reduce the cost of their network deployments. Like other systems vendors (IBM, Cisco, EMC, Dell, Fujitsu, etc.) it is moving strongly towards integrated systems and its networking team has a strong role – especially in understanding how to accommodate and manage devices from other vendors.