Q&A: HP's Todd DeLaughter on the adaptive enterprise

Computerworld - Todd DeLaughter, vice president and general manager of the Management Software Organization at Hewlett-Packard Co., talked last week with senior writer Matt Hamblen about the company's on-demand strategy, which it calls the adaptive enterprise. He also weighed in on HP's competitors and spoke about a new HP Technical User Conference coming in the fall of 2005.
Excerpts from that interview follow:
How did HP get started with its Adaptive Enterprise strategy and what is the central purpose? Adaptive Enterprise is a vision of taking customers toward the synchronization of IT with business directives. Part of that implies being able to respond to changes in a more rapid fashion. It's a bold vision, and there are many steps along the path. And it's not going to be one-stop shopping.
We've been on this strategy for about two years, so it started around the time of the Compaq acquisition by HP. Internally, we saw challenges for our massively large companies and the changes inherent in bringing systems and people together. That resulted in discussions [about] the amount of money required to just do maintenance on IT systems. When we started, we were at about 70% of our budget spent on IT maintenance, and through steps we have evolved our IT organization to flip that around, so that we have a target in the first year of spending 45% on maintenance and 55% on new growth in IT initiatives, and we're driving toward a goal of 30% on maintenance and 70% for new growth. And we think that's an achievable goal for our customers, based on what we do internally.
When you deal with large systems, such as one with 230,000 e-mail accounts, a key element is process change. IT is seen as a service through IT service management and ITIL [Information Technology Infrastructure Library] standards management, which is a European-led initiative and has come to North America as well.
Clearly, there are steps in evolving the organizational view, but once you have that in place, there's a series of things you need to do from the product standpoint to help business get in alignment with services. Our HP OpenView Service Desk product is an example, which has a central representation of all the configuration information in a system, which allows an end-to-end view of the system. Going forward, all our products will leverage a common object model approach, and the advantage is to have a single view of the data.
After that is a service management level, which responds to the need