'Opportunities abound for SMEs to adopt IT'

How do you see the
future of the Indian SME market? What is the technology adoption
trend among SMEs?

In India, the small and
medium enterprises (SME) sector plays a pivotal role in the overall
industrial economy of the country. In the recent years, the SME
sector has consistently registered higher growth rate compared to the
overall industrial sector. There are opportunities abound for the SME
market to adopt
technologies that will advance their operations and expand their
sales capabilities. From information access management to storage to
security, SMEs are focused on broadening the role of technology
within their organizations.

Small businesses are being
encouraged to embrace cloud computing technologies such as cloud
hosting to help reduce costs and improve efficiency. Cloud
collaboration applications will become more powerful and less
expensive over the coming decade. Both private and public clouds are
gaining significant momentum. SMEs will broadly adopt both
applications and infrastructure which continue to exist in the public
cloud. While storage and CRM are two verticals which have significant
public cloud adoption, analytics and long tail applications specific
to verticals will see more adoption in the private cloud. HP as an
infrastructure vendor is creating packaged private cloud stacks with
fully-designed architecture for SMEs. As the packaged private cloud
products are penetrating into the
market, the trend of private cloud adoption should gain significant
momentum.

Some of the upcoming
trends in SME sector are as follows:

Mobile Applications:
There are plenty of applications that are appropriate and useful for
SMEs, but no vendor or service has substantively started capitalizing
on the value of mobile applications in an applications store
environment for SMEs. Mobile communication service providers will
soon create packages of mobile applications for SMEs.

Cloud-Based Services:
SMEs will continue to favor cloud-based email, messaging, and
collaboration solutions. Also, CSPs (Communication Service Providers)
are expected to offer more cloud-based storage and back-up solutions,
as well as begin to dabble in SaaS solutions like CRM.

Novel New Sales
Channels: A small number of CSPs are expected to set up
technology centers aimed at SMEs, featuring multi-vendor solutions
from the mobile and fixed-line telecom industries to the unified
communications, video and cloud services.

With too many IT
players offering various technology/ software solutions to the SME
segment, what are HP's plans to retain its foothold?

In a world where
enterprises must constantly react to changing markets, clients are
increasingly turning to HP's Converged Infrastructure (CI)
offerings to dramatically improve their agility and optimize costs,
allowing IT to provide greater business value. HP extends the
benefits of convergence to deliver new levels of speed, simplicity
and efficiency that enable clients to capitalize and anticipate
change. href="http://www.dqweek.com/HP-enhances-customer-support-program">HP
now has an end-to-end product portfolio-from the network
edge to the core of the data center-under a single pane of glass
management that increases IT administrator productivity and lowers
operational costs.

The company is
uniquely-positioned to build on CI, because it is the only company to
offer a full portfolio of standards-based, integrated solutions and
services developed specifically to solve the complexities of the data
center. We work very closely with our channel partners across the
ESSN (Enterprise Servers, Storage, and Networking Group) portfolio to
address this market and, over the years, we have invested in an
Inside Sales engine to support our partners. We are constantly
working with our partners and distributors to drive more demand
generation and market coverage activities to address the large total
addressable market.

How does the company
address the security concerns of the customers? What are the unique
features of HP's various solutions?

SMEs need to implement a
comprehensive data protection plan to prevent business downtime and
reduce costs associated with data recovery. Many SMEs have large
amounts of data on servers running various business applications,
databases and operating systems. A shared storage array ensures high
availability and improved storage capacity utilization for this data.
At the same time, the storage array must be easy to manage and cost
effective for SMEs. HP solutions enable SMEs to store, manage and
protect data in a simple, cost-effective manner. They offer improved
storage management capabilities and simplified data protection that
allow SMEs to focus on innovation rather than managing their
technology infrastructure. They often find the cost and complexity of
implementing shared storage a barrier to adopting server
virtualization.

The HP StorageWorks P4000
Virtual SAN Appliance (VSA) is a software solution that enables them
to easily build a storage area network (SAN) for virtual servers
without purchasing a physical storage array. The HP StorageWorks
P2000 G3 Modular Smart Array family offers high performance and
greater storage flexibility at an affordable price. Its simplicity
and ease of use is ideal for the growing SMEs that want to deploy
equipment today while planning for future capacity and performance
requirements. In addition to this, strategic for CIOs, we have a
winning combination of application security products, namely,
TippingPoint for networking security; Fortify for application
vulnerability/security at development stage and ArcSight for event
and information management.

The company says it is
focusing on CI competency. Can you elaborate this concept? What about
HP's networking solution plans?

HP Converged
Infrastructure has helped customers overcome the inflexibility and
high costs created by IT sprawl to shift more resources to innovation
and strategic initiatives. One of the key learnings from HP, CI is
creating an energy-efficient data center that delivers simplicity,
integration and automation whereby the IT environment is
synergistically aligned to the needs of the business.

This unique approach has
helped business accelerate application delivery in a predictable,
repeatable way that makes the most efficient use of IT, facility and
staff resources to drive business innovation. Greater exposure to HP
sales, channel partners and customers, everyone in the HP
ecosystem-from architects to marketing to sales to support-stands
behind the HP CI strategy.

To accelerate this
engagement with customers and partners, we combined our new
networking portfolio with our servers and storage offerings over a
year back to form what we call the ESSN division. Our customers today
have the unique opportunity to look at our entire portfolio under one
roof to address the end-to-end infrastructure needs for their
customers who are increasingly looking at converged infrastructure
solutions from HP.