HEWLETT PACKARD ENTERPRISE (HPE) and its recently appointed top honcho Andy Isherwood, managing director and enterprise group leader, EMEA, believe that the MENA (Middle East and Africa) region, although being challenged due to pressure on oil prices, is a very progressive and very exciting market, and they hope to build on the significant footprint they have had over the last 30 to 35 years. "Clearly the MENA region, as we define it, is a very important region, quite an exciting region, not only Saudi Arabia with what's happening with the NTP 2020 and Vision 2030 statement of intent and vision, but also in other countries like Dubai etc. are very progressive in some of the newer, current technologies, smart cities etc.," said Isherwood in a recent telephonic interview with the Saudi Gazette. "Saudi has been one of the growth areas, clearly there are challenges in terms of oil price, and also from an investment standpoint...But I think that in many ways they (Saudi) have speeded up the need and the desire to actually transform from oil-based economies to actually be way more progressive," added Isherwood. Isherwood's views on the MENA region, in general, and Saudi market, in particular, was augmented by Chris Johnson, vice president for Middle East and Africa, stating that ‘we're into the role of boosting the Middle East digital journey.' Johnson, while calling the region exciting but generally, very innovative, said, "We see the digital journey on three levels. One is business and organizations individually, but also on a city level and government level — with the likes of Dubai Smart City, a project in which we are involved in — a comfortable journey that the city is taking and you expand that a little further you have the Saudi NTP 2020 and Vision 2030, which is a whole country's digital journey, which I have to say is hugely ambitious, and extremely exciting in what we can deliver in that journey, and how HPE can bring value to the Kingdom and support the realization of the vision..." Johnson was emphatic of continuing in the leadership role in the Saudi market, in which he claimed HPE to have 55 percent market share in the compute market today, largely due to them working in the Kingdom for more than 30 years. "We've been present in the Saudi market for more than 20 years. So we've been really here since the beginning of IT, and were very embedded in the history. We've personal relationships with a number of government entities, ministries with Aramco, STC, Mobily, and Sabic to name a few. And over the time we've built up a leadership role here," he said. "We've been growing that share incrementally quarter by quarter... and the advent of the Vision 2030 gives us a real platform to build on the strategies that Andy just elaborated by really delivering value to the country," Johnson added. "Recently we signed a MoU with the ICT minister in the country. We are investing in the education-enabled IT segment, we're helping the development of the human capital in the IT industry..... really develop skills and interest in IT and we're making significant investments and contributing to that program," he said. "We're also bringing cloud innovation into the region, so we are busy orchestrating the cloud communities, whether they be public or private ... large companies or startups ... to provide the cloud capacity in the standardization and the openness of the cloud to benefit the national transformation plan," Johnson added. "Also bringing programs like this to the nation is bringing the benefits of Silicon Valley and the startup culture there into Saudi Arabia to help nurture that innovation through nurturing cloud production, great software, going to markets on a global scale... "We've a real bunch of digital projects, however, the one for me is the Smart City, in particular. We're taking a keen interest in the Riyadh Smart City program, where we already have heavily been involved in the transportation piece of that smart program...and our strategy is perfect in driving that hybrid cloud, IoT capability to support in us becoming smarter and the government becoming more effective," he said. Isherwood then rounded off HPE digital journey in the region by stating, "It is going to be a journey, and it's not going to happen overnight. But I think that (journey) the country needs to plan for and eventually happen. Adoption has been very slow, and we'll be there just to make sure that when it happens that it is done right and done securely." "We anticipate that public cloud has some advantages that can be taken advantage of by most organizations or public cloud services in one way or another. And we have seen that take off in Americas, in Europe, and I would agree that in this region security is a more prominent issue, individual country borders and legislations and culture. "That has defined that public cloud has been slower to evolve. And this is the part of the value that we want to bring to Saudi NTP. It is really ensuring the way that clouds are built whether it is government clouds, public clouds or private clouds that there is a common approach to security that'll allow these organizations to take advantage of public services," Isherwood stressed. Isherwood briefly touched on the organization called HPE, saying that it's a $28 billion business focused on hybrid IT, the intelligent edge and the services capability to deliver against the market-expectations and customer expectations. "I think, we are in one of those points in time where Hewlett Packard has evolved into an organization to address the needs. I think we've been very good at that for the last 76 years of our existence. We kind of (invented)... Silicon Valley and we continue to evolve... over a period of time to make sure that we are relevant. "During the last five years we've gone through major transformation really driven by the changes in the industry. I think remaining relevant and leading the industry is kind of what we are all about," Isherwood said. "We were a very broad-based technology company selling everything from inkjet printers all the way to running the largest government contracts, so this breadth of capability was both good and bad... good at that point of time because I think the market has moved to a place where speed and agility is at the forefront of one's mind, so you clearly have to adapt one's organization. "We did a number of things in that 5-year period to put ourselves into a position to prepare ourselves for the next era and that included reinventing — including a significant amount of research and development, which we probably lost a little bit of our sight on. "Clearly as a technology company the core of what we do in technology — so technology investment is critical. We had a significant negative position reflected by our balance sheet, which needed correcting. So we went back to our fundamentals correcting it during that three-four years period, which we did and we delivered on quarter on quarter against analysts expectations... we repositioned ourselves in the market and we ignited our imagination and we did all those things," Isherwood said on the shift and renewed focus of HP. "It led to this position when in 2015 we decided to separate — break the company into two. Hewlett Packard Inc., which really focused on the consumer and commercial products like printers, PCs and laptops and the second bit of business, which we named Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), that focuses on the enterprise," Isherwood said. "So between these two co-pillars are the HP Financial Services which provides consumption-based and leasing models that help people consume IT as a service and enterprise services all made up HPE in November 2015. "That's how we separated the company about 14 to 15 months ago and the separation went very well, as it allowed the two companies to focus on what they were good at in the market and really created a $50 billion company to provide a greater level of speed and agility in the market," Isherwood said. "As we went through the last year, there were number of things that were continuing to shift in the market that really reshaped HPE's enterprise and IT segment. This is where connectivity is one of the key things. We saw a huge shift of work to cloud — public cloud gained presence, software defined architecture became very much more prevalent and the data explosion which we can feel and see in our day-to-day life. "The move to mobile continues with speed, we do most of our work on the move, so the whole advent of mobile continues to grow exponentially, and we are really seeing now the advent of IoT and there's a growing need for industrial IoT So those were some of the things happening in the industry that led us to believe to transfer the focus of our organization, so we decided to do some spin mergers," Isherwood added. "So on April 3rd this year, we took out the enterprise services business and merged this with CSC to create the second largest outsourcing services organization globally - which is now called DXC.technology that would see the taking out (sourcing) enterprise business and we'll spin that out of the HP business and merge that with a company called CST— to create the second largest outsourcing services organization, and that would allow them to focus and compete in that very competitive market," Isherwood said. The second spin and merger that we'll do will happen in the timeframe of August this year, which is to spin out some of our non-core software assets and combine them with a company called Micro Focus to create a $4.5 billion organization focused on software. "Again there are very different demands in software business versus the hardware and infrastructure business versus the outsourcing business," Isherwood said. So really what we are trying to do here is to get our organization into a place where we can execute all out strategies to deliver what the customers need and be relevant going forward. So the remaining organization will be a $28 billion business really focused on three key things. First of all addressing the needs of our customers and making hybrid IT real. "What we mean by that, we mean allowing customers to put workloads either on premise or off premise into a public cloud, to provide the advice and support and the infrastructure for them to be able to do that," Isherwood said. Second of all, we are about powering the intelligent edge, so this is about making sure that the requirement for the mobile and digital is really at the forefront of what we do. "So this is being done on the number of acquisition... it's being done with Aruba being the core one which will allow us to build our intelligent edge, the ability and requirement at the edge of the network to (connect) be it in your mobile phone, or in the smart city all that can ..... power in consumption-based mobile, all need to be moved very much to the edge," he said. The third, is the strategy that is very much to deliver the expertise that the customers need to make those two things happen. "So we have an organization of services-capability really focused on delivering what customers need around those three key areas," he said. With regard to the fact that companies in the region are transitioning to a next-generation software-defined infrastructure and how well is HPE equipped to serve the region with their innovative solutions?, Isherwood said, "Software-defined infrastructure is at the heart of HPE's Hybrid IT strategy and recent moves accelerate the company's ability to deliver a multi-cloud, multi-IaaS platform, powered by automation software and composable infrastructure. HPE is investing aggressively to deliver on this software-defined vision, both organically and inorganically. This includes the availability of HPE Synergy, the industry's first composable infrastructure platform, treating infrastructure as code, enabling developers to accelerate application delivery. "By extending HPE Synergy's fully programmable infrastructure to HPE's multi-cloud platform, HPE is enabling IT operators to deliver software-defined infrastructure as quickly as customers' businesses demand. Also, we have recently made some very exciting acquisitions that further strengthen HPE's position in the software-defined infrastructure space. Among others, HPE acquired SimpliVity, a leading provider of software-defined, hyperconverged infrastructure. "This is a significant step forward in our vision to expand HPE's software-defined capability and make Hybrid IT simple for our customers. With this deal, we bring together our best-in-class infrastructure, automation and cloud management software with SimpliVity's software-defined data management platform. Together, HPE and SimpliVity will deliver solutions that bring customers secure, highly resilient, on-premises infrastructure at public cloud economics and this will further deliver on our objective of driving regional innovation. On the company's maxim Powering "the Intelligent Edge", Isherwood elucidated, with the advent of IoT, the need to monitor, analyze and act upon conditions in machines, factories or shopping malls in real time is leading companies to process data in closer proximity to the devices out on the "edge" of their networks. IT needs to be closer to the things. Think of a car driving 100 miles per hour, which has to decide what the object right in front is — it cannot wait for a cloud to respond. "The physical distance of a central computer brings a latency into the process which in many cases is not tolerable. In addition, the unfiltered transmission of machine data leads to an overloading of the networks — especially since more and more unsorted data is collected in order to find previously unknown patterns and correlations. Cars, as well as factories, hospitals or retail stores have to become small datacenters if we want to capture the promise of the IoT — not only to ensure the speed of processing but also in order to manage the magnitude of data that will be created by these IoT devices. "This approach solves the latency problem by significantly shortening transmission paths. And it solves the bandwidth problem because no raw data, only the results of preliminary analysis, have to be transferred to remote computers. They only perform analysis tasks that are not subject to real-time requirements, for example long-term trend analysis or deeper error analysis. HPE innovations for the Intelligent Edge include HPE Aruba Clearpass, Edgeline and Micro Datacenter." When asked for his recommendations to enterprises and solution providers alike to tackle the major challenge — cost in the current economic climate, Isherwood was optimistic in his reply. He said, "Despite the current cost pressures, we think the major opportunity lies in looking at digital transformation, which can help reduce costs and generate more efficiencies in the business operations — though we also must find ways to differentiate the company and drive more growth. "Digitization leads to structural changes in every industry. New players will enter the realm and may quickly gain significant market power. Traditional companies, on the other hand, run the risk of becoming an extended workbench of a predominantly digital value creation. Accordingly, digital transformation is not only about achieving a few percentage points of efficiency, but about the introduction of new processes, new forms of cooperation in the supply chain and new ways of commercializing products and services."
