Today's business, yesterday's IT

How do I build a bridge between application development and application integration? And, how do I do it quickly and efficiently and yet inexpensively?

You know that information technology is vital to the success of your business. And you know that IT is more than necessary overhead—it is a competitive asset. And you also know that IT is essential to provide the speed and agility in a world where business decisions and market changes have to be managed in real time.

Just think about the problems that you are wrestling with in your own organization—security, reliability, stability, risk mitigation.

Every CIO wants these things and wants flexibility and, yes, lower total cost of ownership and they want to be able to measure a return on their IT investment. And these are all problems that are solved by technology and all of them require ongoing innovation.

Survival means ability to change

Now in addition to cost and quality and stability and reliability and risk mitigation, why do we focus on change? Because the ability to manage change is increasingly the difference between the companies that win and the companies that lose.

Inside of HP, we have been using a quote over the past several years that talks about change, and it's from Charles Darwin, who said: "It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but those most responsive to change."

And whether you are talking about the adaptability of a species, or the survivability of a company, the ability not only to survive change, but to thrive on it, is one of the keys to success in a rapidly evolving environment.

Change, as it ripples across your systems, must be predictable and controllable. At HP, we say that every business decision triggers an IT event. And so, the changes that are triggered have to be predictable and controllable. Your technology has to be designed to give your IT department the ability not only to control the impact of change, but to use it as a competitive advantage.

Infrastructure has to be able to flex with the business, whenever the business demands it. It must become a platform for the efficient and effective operation of the business—a platform for the efficient and effective delivery of data, business applications and processes.

Now at HP, we are using our own experience, the industry's strongest portfolio of products, services, people, tools, methodologies and world-class partners to build a powerful platform for managing change. We call it the Adaptive Enterprise, and it is at the heart of the solutions that we are offering to businesses of all sizes.

The core architecture of AE

The core of our adaptive enterprise is a framework that we call the Darwin Reference Architecture. It is a standards-based framework that leverages best-of-breed technology and components, not only from HP, but also from best-of-breed partners.

And the architecture provides several key advantages. It creates a new level of integration between business and IT. It lowers IT acquisition and IT operating costs by using industry standards to drive efficiencies and economies of scale. And, it provides an evolutionary path to adaptive infrastructure, enabling you to take the right steps at the right time.

Here are the key elements of the Darwin Reference Architecture:

It begins with the view that an enterprise is a set of business processes that link customers to the company, employees to one another, and in many cases customers and suppliers to all of them. And these business processes are supported by a set of applications and infrastructure technologies.

The architecture builds on a foundation of services and software. The measurement and assessment services that we provide look at the breadth and depth of the enterprise, from business processes, to applications, to infrastructure. And a good example of that would be our adaptive application architecture.

It's a service that builds on the reference architecture by applying Web services to help speed up a company's ability to develop applications, integrate them into their IT environment and manage them more effectively.

On software, management software monitors all aspects of the data center, detects issues that need to be resolved, and takes action either automatically—such as server vitalization, storage utilization—as well as self-healing services.

Our architecture discussion starts at the business process level, where we get the most leverage. And it's helped us clearly define the business application infrastructure that supports the business processes.

And then finally, there's the infrastructure layer where all the technology, products, services and standards come together in a truly adaptive and flexible enterprise. At this layer, we virtualize all the resources, including servers and storage and network capability.

The Adaptive Enterprise is real. HP is delivering against this architecture today, and it builds on the expertise and the experience we gained as we integrated the IT infrastructure of HP and Compaq during the past year.

We're bringing to our customers the expertise, tools, people, services, products and the discipline that we've used and developed as we accomplished our own massive IT integration.

And just to give you a sense, when we brought these two companies together, we had more than 7,000 applications and 160,000 employees in 167 countries.

We are actually the largest e-commerce transactor in the world. We had 260,000 total e-mail addresses. And, using this reference architecture, these tools, these disciplines, our products, our people, and our services, we were able to pull all that together and do business as one company on Day One.

That means an integrated website to our customers, integrated supply chains, and integrated e-mail so that all of our employees could collaborate, find one another, and talk with one another on Day One.

In the process of doing all that, we reduced our IT costs by 25 percent. In other words, we achieved a better return on our IT investment, which is precisely what we think you want to do.

HP delivers more

At HP we know IT drives business value. We think we have the biggest proof point in the industry. We know IT drives business value, and we know it drives performance and competitive advantage. And at HP, we are committed to delivering more of what you demand.