So it’s March 2008 and here we are in Barcelona for the annual HP event finding out what HP themselves are up to and what their partners are doing.
It is a 3 day event running from noon on Monday through to noon on Wednesday and is by invitation only. This year my invite came via Computacenter (thank you) who flew me out, put me up in a VERY nice hotel, fed me and entertained me for the trip.
So what’s it all about?
Well this is the one week of the year where HP EMEA, it’s partners and it’s customers come together. HP use it as a showpiece and often make some exclusive anouncements around new products etc. This is backed up by over 250 breakout sessions covering all topics and at levels ranging from technical to business and strategy.
This year the event was held at the CCIB in Barcelona
This years main announcements were around the new ProLiant DL785 which is an 8 way quad core server which will scale to 256GB of RAM. The 5 number in the DL785 model number tells us that this is based on AMD chips. There were also a number of anouncements around new data center specific management software that increases the capability of Insight Manager even more.
So what was hot and what made me stop and think?
Well there was some very interesting stuff around C Class blades but as this was shown to me under NDA, I will have to keep quiet on that until the Fall.
Microsoft were making lots of noise around unified communications linking voice, video, email, messaging and so on into one platform and one interface. Is any of this new? No however Microsoft are very good at showing how to use such technology and no doubt will be putting out some very good marketing this year based on this. Add to this that they will be basing most of this around their existing product set (Office, Exchange, Share Point etc) and will leverage some of the built in Windows stuff such as presence and if nothing else, they will get companies thinking about using this technology. Regardless of that company then implementing a Microsoft platform or something else, the fact remains that unified communication is going to be the hot topic again this year.
GREEN GREEN GREEN GREEN GREEN!
No surprises there then or where they?
When Dennis Pamlin (global policy advisor for the WWF) stands on stage and tells you to buy more servers, build more data centres and burn more CO2 you have to pay attention. His view is more simple. IT can be used to help us travel less, build more efficient buildings and so on. The extra enviromental cost of the data centre is more off set by the enviromental savings made all around the world because of it.
Peter Cochrane gave us his personal view of what the future may look like and again focused on how technology will enable us to work smarter and make the world smaller.
So overall was it worth the trip?
12 months ago I was in Berlin at the same event. At the time, virtualisation and blades were the hot topic. This year, we are seeing much of the same but this time it is no longer bleeding edge. This technology is in use today by major orgnisations in production platforms. We have stopped talking and started doing.
So what for the next 12 months in HP land?
I am guessing that we will see many more services on offer. A lot more technology moving into the cloud. Convergance may see a revival as well. We are also going to see a lot more intelligence applied to how we use things.
One example of this is that this week I learnt that how you write your application code can have a direct impact on how much power a CPU uses. So you can have a CPU running at 100% utilisation and see it pull 150 watts. Write your code properly and you can have the same CPU running the same application and still at 100% utilisation yet only pull 90 watts! Apparently the mobiles platform coders are getting good at this. Server platform coders don’t even know this exists. Room for huge savings me thinks.
So there you go. A quick 3 days in Barcelona packed with lots of info. For downloads of the presentations and other info from the event, go to the HP Web Site where it is all available. All we need to know now is where are we meeting next year.
