How to optimise enterprise solutions

Getting to this ultimate state of business fitness combines three distinctive notions: the Adaptive infrastructure as a foundation, Adaptive Management for controlling the infrastructure and linking it to your business needs, and Adaptive Enterprise solutions, where the work actually gets done.

It begins with an assessment of a company's current adaptive capabilities. This assessment measures time, range and ease: how much time it takes the company to change a business process, the breadth and complexity of how much change it can handle at any one time, and the ease with which these changes are handled.

This scored report indicates the level of agility in the company's infrastructure and business process procedures, and how well its architecture is serving its current needs. A typical agility profile might, for example, show that a company's supply chain management function is something of a 'hot spot.'

After that, HP helps customers develop a planning and investment scheme for moving toward the goal of an adaptive enterprise. This plan might range from specific adaptive infrastructure products and technology, to adaptive management software and services, to recommendations on architecture and fully realized services-led solutions.

One way to picture it is a pyramid. At the bottom are the standardized, interoperable systems with built-in adaptive infrastructure technology features. These include the capability to handle multiple operating systems, flexible partitioning, storage and server network standards that sort of thing.

In the middle are the adaptive management features and services such as lifecycle data management, automated maintenance and software that automatically adjusts resources on the fly. This is the layer that links IT much closer to business processes, and then adjusts everything as the business changes day to day, hour to hour, or second to second. At the top of the pyramid are the Adaptive Enterprise solutions.

'Ours is a services-led approach to the adaptive enterprise,' says Ann Livermore, the executive vice president of HP's large services division. 'In a nutshell, what we do is develop a profile of a company's IT strengths and weaknesses. Then, working with them, we put together a priority plan targeting specific agility problems and investments. And then we work out various approaches to help them work through those plans.'