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HP Businesses The Media

So, HP, What Exactly Are You Trying To Sell Us? 312

Posted by timothy from the carl-french dept.
billtom writes "There's an article over at c|net news where the normally fawning technology business press actually takes an HP VP to task for the extremely vague statements that usually surround enterprise software 'products.' With some gems like 'That could be boilerplate applying to any company,' and 'But again, how does that differ from what's been around?' and 'But hasn't that always been the goal?'" I'd like to see Charles Cooper interview whoever came up with .Net, too.
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So, HP, What Exactly Are You Trying To Sell Us? More

So, HP, What Exactly Are You Trying To Sell Us?

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  • Marketsp'aek (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dolo666 ( 195584 ) * on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @11:11AM (#7510723) Journal
    I think the companies that bought into the Internet era blitz in the 90's, all thought there was a magic bullet that could rocket them to the future. The problem is, that they, like everyone else, were duped into buying hype that was based around nothing more than shallow promises of a better today.

    The jargon coming from HP, is to try and market to company types with buying power, to give them a new slogan or saying that could be used to grab onto and use in the office, so that they don't have to do any work.

    Scott Adams' Dilbert cartoon captures the reality of what's going on today. Executives would rather appear to be working, than actually working, so they invent new descriptions of what they are doing that sound really busy!

    I think the best slogan is hard work, but nobody likes hard work, unless someone else is doing it.

    From the article: "I define AE as a business strategy for customers who want to respond in real time to changes affecting their business."

    Translation: We know your business operates in something called time. Time is money. We want money, so therefore we will trade you your own time for money. We accomplish this by selling you your own time back, but we change it to something called real-time. Or ideally I have no idea what those geeks in research have come up with and it's not my job to know, so I'll just make something up and hope you bite. Besides, none of the marketing based people will understand what they came up with anyway, so who cares?

    • Re:Marketsp'aek (Score:5, Funny)

      by pegr ( 46683 ) * on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @11:23AM (#7510839) Homepage Journal
      Reminds me of the classic joke:

      Q: What's the difference between a used car salesman and a computer salesman?

      A: The used car salesman KNOWS when he's lieing to you!

    • Re:Marketsp'aek (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I think they are trying to do what IBM is doing. If you think of the climate today, all companies are trying to shed costs and stop spending. When I see the IBM adds it makes me feel as if to accomplish the goals of becoming profitable in a recession I must keep purchasing enterprise level hardware and software. To some part that is true. As an engineer I know when IT departments make poor choices due to budget contraints because they have no money to spend. As a consumer I do the same. I may choose t

    • Re:Marketsp'aek (Score:3, Interesting)

      by cgenman ( 325138 )
      Despite all of the jargon, when Nora Denzel was cornered and forced to respond intelligently, she did.

      She said, in essence, that HP will help you automate everything, and will do so in such a way that you can still change things. She cited a real-world reason to do so, and how it saved money.

      Is it revolutionary? No... And she did back off from admitting as such. But it is useful, and it is how IT is supposed to be done. She might not know exactly how the technology is implemented, but she knows what

      • Re:Marketsp'aek (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Frymaster ( 171343 ) on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @12:01PM (#7511147) Homepage Journal
        espite all of the jargon, when Nora Denzel was cornered and forced to respond intelligently

        this is at the core of what's wrong with buzzwords. they start as meaningful and then get hijacked by the marketing department and media and are bled dry of all content.

        witness "enterprise". back in the day of "client server" computing it was realized that there were environments that were so big that each server was the client of other servers and the peer to yet more. clusters of lans in wans that were themselves clustered. do describe the feudal structure that was built to accomodate this size and complexity of network, we came up with a word: enterprise.

        of course, marketing realized that since enterprise-class products were the most expensive they should really work at making sure everybody felt they had to have them. a buzzword got born by the appropriation of a valid term and now i can buy an "enterprise desktop" solution for numerous products. "enterprise desktop"? what the hell is that? marketing, m'lad, marketing.

        anyway. glad to see someone call the sales team on their buzzwordery. if we want to protect the meaning of our tech descriptions we'll have to fight the sales team for them - or stick to six-letter acronyms that they won't want (call the vpn the "iskampd" box fr instance)

      • Re:Marketsp'aek (Score:3, Insightful)

        by loosifer ( 314643 )
        Despite all of the jargon, when Nora Denzel was cornered and forced to respond intelligently, she did.

        No, she didn't. She just kept saying "you need to tie the business to the resource". That's just as much gibberesh as anything else. What exactly am I supposed to tie to what? Applications to hardware? My business goals with IT expenditures? There is no such thing as "business" in this sense. Is your business your customers? Your shareholders? Your inventory? Your employees? Which of those am

        • Re:Marketsp'aek (Score:3, Insightful)

          by JGski ( 537049 )
          I actually know what there are offering, saying and trying to do, but is classic HP-marketing style they've flubbed the communication badly - used be they would flub marketing by being overly technical, yet correct ("HP would market sushi as cold, dead fish"). Now it appears that they are flubbing by over-MBA-ing, or more specifically, over-Operations-Research-ing their marketing. It may communicate with some MBAs but most techies won't have a clue. There isn't some specific technology that will give you

          • I have to ask: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by AB3A ( 192265 )

            It may communicate with some MBAs but most techies won't have a clue. There isn't some specific technology that will give you an "adaptive enterprise". Even worse, most of what they are propose won't really do the job. However the vagueness is somewhat justified because what keeps most companies from being adaptive to changing market environments isn't technical or even financial, but rather sociological and psychological

            Recognizing that you have experience I do not (no, I don't have an MBA), what soci

    • "I define AE as a business strategy for customers who want to respond in real time to changes affecting their business."

      This looks like it came directly from the Dilbert [dilbert.com] mission statement generator.

    • Too true. As a matter of fact, he responded with that specific answer twice, and vaguely a few times. Just another guy in white shoes and matching belt that left his chin out for ths reporter.

      It was an enjoyable read, simply because I hate the white shoe types.

    • HP Adaptation (Score:3, Informative)

      by emil ( 695 )

      Instead of all of this unintelligble claptrap, HP needs to devote a decent amount of concentration to their Enterprise systems division, and make some hard choices.

      HP is no longer saying "bet the company" on Itanium, but currently HP-UX and VMS are totally wagered on Intel's unproven architecture.

      The Alpha base has been easy pickings for Solaris and Linux, and the rest of the HP Enterprise customer base is watching as HP "burns the boats" and our systems investments vaporize.

      I realize that HP believes

      • I know the history, but it still seems strange to this old-timer (who was involved in the decision to buy one of the first 11/780s for a college lab) to see VMS referred to in the context of HP operating systems.

    • be fair (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Crag ( 18776 ) on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @12:55PM (#7511632)
      I hate to spring to the defense of Big Corporations, but it's really not that hard to interpret Marketsp'aek positively:

      "I define AE as a business strategy for customers who want to respond in real time to changes affecting their business."

      My translation: AE is (an expensive product which helps companies setup) a business strategy under which trends trigger actions. The use of 'business strategy' sounds meaningless, but it's actually two words which imply two paragraphs. 'Strategy' in this case is an overloaded term referring to a collection of tools, policies, and proceedures.

      The use of 'real time' in business means something very different from its meaning in computer science. It means 'today' instead of 'eventually'. I work for a large media company with an animal for a mascot, and it takes us years to respond to changes in the marketplace. Most of our innertia is rooted in size, conservative management, and fear of risk. However, if we had a system of automation which identified potentially interesting changes in the marketplace, especially in merchandising, it could save us a lot of money.

      For example, how much should we invest in online sales, and how much in more traditional sales? We make money from both, now, so it's a very serious question. A missed sale is a lost sale, but there's no point in trying to extract blood from a turnip. We have people who try to figure out where the tastiest blood is, but they are limited by their tools and proceedures. This AE might actually be just the thing they need.

      I don't know if AE is any good, or if it's what it claims to be, but I do know that marketing speak CAN have a real meaning in a marketing context. When we geeks ridicule the suits for talking gibberish, it's no better than when they ridicule us for our acronyms, l33t, tech talk and other not-quite-english that we use. "We aggregate packet-based transactions, over-selling a large pipe to small nodes who could collectively saturate that pipe, but in practice don't" would mean nothing to a marketing type, but to an ISP sysadmin it's her raison d'etre.

      If we hope to make any progress in the things that really matter (digital freedom), we need to learn to communicate with these people. Their protocols may be bad, but it works for them, and marketing types don't have firmware upgrades, so we need to learn to speak their protocols if we hope to route any traffic through them, or to comandeer them for our noble purposes. :)

    • Re:Marketsp'aek (Score:5, Interesting)

      by sosegumu ( 696957 ) on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @01:08PM (#7511750)

      Charles: ''There still seems to be confusion surrounding the topic. At the Gartner conference last month, some IT attendees said they still say they didn't understand what Carly Fiorina wanted to convey with HP's Adaptive Enterprise. Do you feel the message is unclear or needs rethinking?''

      Nora: ''I disagree that it was unclear...''

      This is the height of corporate arrogance. If someone doesn't understand an idea that has been presented to them, then it is by definition unclear . I would think that it would be the responsibility of the entity selling something to be able to clearly communicate what the product actually is and what it's benefits are.

      As far as I can tell, AE is the same thing that independent consultants have been offering for years. It's a classic case of ''The Emperor Has No Clothes,'' and the whole point of this asinine jargon that HP is using is to bully the prospective buyer into thinking that it must be far more complicated than their simple minds can handle. I almost spewed my diet cola through my nose when Nora (presumably with a straight face) said that ''you can't buy an Adaptive Enterprise.'' If you can't buy it, then how can they sell it? Whoops--better call HP and buy a 55-gallon drum of their HP Special Snake Oil to straighten it all out for us!

      Much of what I do is helping the average business owner/manager with 8 workstations understand that they don't actually need the $18,000 server that was pitched to them by some IT Barnum with a handful of glossy brochures touting ''industry-leading scalability and resource utilization.'' When they find out that their old P3 workstation with an extra hard drive, TRAVAN drive and SAMBA is up to the task of tossing 4MB data files across their peer-to-peer network, they're quite surprised.

      I quit my Fortune 500 job two years ago when I just couldn't take the idiocy anymore. True, I make half of what I used to, I work 50% more hours, and my medical benefits suck, but at least I don't have to talk to people who can't finish a sentence without using the words ''dynamic,'' ''deploy,'' ''real-time,'' or ''paradigm,'' and that makes it all worth it.

      Kudos to Charles Cooper for taking this Carly Fiorina sycophant to task. Unfortunately, if this writer keeps it up, he either won't have a job or nobody in the IT business will give him interviews.

    • Re:Marketsp'aek (Score:2, Interesting)

      by iion_tichy ( 643234 )
      I think the internet makes for a much better today. I am amazed how people can not see it. But I guess we all don't have very good memories. I almost can't remember how I did things without internet access.

  • Another example of HP confusion (Score:3, Interesting)

    by i_want_you_to_throw_ ( 559379 ) * on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @11:11AM (#7510734) Journal
    HP funds the SCO Roadshow [slashdot.org] and they are also giving 24/7 support to Linux [slashdot.org].

    Yes, HP can be confusing sometimes

    • Re:Another example of HP confusion (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Zocalo ( 252965 ) on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @11:22AM (#7510829) Homepage
      HP can be confusing sometimes

      So can most big companies with thier fingers in lots of pies. Take Sony - it sells music and complains about P2P and copyright issues, yet it also makes hardware that makes is very easy to infringe those same copyrights. They were also threatened with legislation by Philips, their partners in designing the CD, about selling non standard CDs with the official logo on them.

      All part of the fun and games that is big business.

  • A plus sign (Score:3, Funny)

    by nycsubway ( 79012 ) on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @11:12AM (#7510739) Homepage
    They're selling plus signs, in fact they're selling a whole bunch of plus signs. They seem to sell them in groups. they can catch criminals and make a guy get home from the moon.

  • What is CNET smoking? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Fux the Penguin ( 724045 ) on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @11:12AM (#7510745) Journal
    I know, here on Slashdot we frequently harangue CNET for their decidedly pro-business anti-linux slant, but I think they erred the other way here. Having read the article, it seems pretty clear to me, that the author simply wasn't competent enough in the field to conduct the interview. Seriously, would you send a wet-behind the ears English-lit major to interview a Nobel prize winning physicist for the cover story in the "Physics Home Journal?" I'm sorry, but if you can't tell me the correlation between the eigenvector of the (sparse) matrix describing the arrangement of crystal lattice structures in a semi-solid and the mass/energy waveform coefficients, you should be out covering donkey shows, not hard science! (BTW, the eigenvector is directly proportional to the waveform's beta coefficient).

    That said, check out this gem:

    Q: Stripped of all the jargon and market-speak, can you succinctly define what Adaptive Enterprise is supposed to be about?
    A: I define AE as a business strategy for customers who want to respond in real time to changes affecting their business.
    Q: That could be boilerplate applying to any company. What's the special sauce?
    A:The secret sauce that HP brings is the ability to link business processes--which obviously are a manifestation of a company's strategy--to IT gear. The big breakthrough is when those two things are synchronized, so changes in the business environment can dynamically trigger the IT changes necessary to support that business change.

    He should never have needed to ask that twice. HP's response was clear to anyone who's been struggling to cultivate dynamic convergence in their disintermediate, yet robust, technologies.

    I work IT for one of the lower-end Fortune 500 companies (I won't mention any names, but we're the 2nd largest manufacturer of Internet-enabled personal sanitation devices in the U.S.), and we're seriously looking at HP's AE technology for our next round of upgrades. I am so tired of having to re-virtualize all our front-end functionalities every time the boss-man wants to streamline our synergistic e-services. Now, if I simply had a frictionless front-end action-item, right there in my real-time vortal (vertical portal) I'd be made.

    Anyway, Slashdotters, don't believe this CNET FUD. I think AE definitely has the potential to recontextualize the debate on revolutionary mindshare schemas.
    • You sir, are my Internet Idol for the day (I guess that makes you an eIdol? (I would put a diarisis over the e, but /. strips out any accents.)

      I couldn't have put it better. It isn't enough to say "well, this product implements configuration management!" the issue is having the IT systems that are either in place or soon-to-be in place accurately reflect the delicate intricacies that are our living business process. Being in the embedded control field, we have a dedicated audit trail for all of our netwo
    • Good one... send that to Scott Adams :-)
    • HP makes us techs use PeopleSoft :^(
    • Q: Stripped of all the jargon and market-speak, can you succinctly define what Adaptive Enterprise is supposed to be about?
      A: I define AE as a business strategy for customers who want to respond in real time to changes affecting their business.
      Q: That could be boilerplate applying to any company. What's the special sauce?
      A:The secret sauce that HP brings is the ability to link business processes--which obviously are a manifestation of a company's strategy--to IT gear. The big breakthrough is when those two
    • I'm sorry, but if you can't tell me the correlation between the eigenvector of the (sparse) matrix describing the arrangement of crystal lattice structures in a semi-solid and the mass/energy waveform coefficients, you should be out covering donkey shows, not hard science! (BTW, the eigenvector is directly proportional to the waveform's beta coefficient).

      I'm not sure if you fully grasp the difference between eigenvectors and eigenvalues, so we will all have to cover donkey shows together.

      Do we really ne

    • Q: That could be boilerplate applying to any company. What's the special sauce?
      A:The secret sauce that HP brings is...

      This? [hpfoods.com]

  • Software companies and their buzzword generators. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @11:16AM (#7510774)

    Every software company is guilty of this. A program that does general ledger and billing sounds much sexier when called a "best-of-breed integrated calculation solution, designed to drive your business into the 21st century and beyond." And a server-monitoring tool sounds better when you call it a "proactive fault-finding and troubleshooting environment, making your data center fully autonomic and self-healing."

    It's kind of wierd for the press to actually start asking hard questions. Think tanks like Gartner et al live and die by techno-hype. The latest thing going around in CIO-land is Utility Computing, so we'll see what comes of that.

    • Re:Software companies and their buzzword generator (Score:5, Insightful)

      by I8TheWorm ( 645702 ) on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @12:26PM (#7511392) Journal
      You ought to be modded +5 Insightful on that one. As a professional developer, I'm sick of PHB's buying into the white-shoed-salesman jargon. At JPMorgan Chase, my PHB bought a $200,000 "system" from Cisco for handling customer service team e-mails. When it failed miserably, I and another developer wrote an SMTP front end in a matter of weeks (our time cost JMPC $7200) and it had more features.

      Our manager asked why we didn't mention we could do that before, which shocked me. My response was that he never mentioned this new "system" until it was already paid for. We were his programmers, and this was a programming issue. In the future he should consider talking to his programmers before he spent massive sums on ideas.

      He's since been fired.
    • It strikes me that this is more about branding than anything. What sets any big-name real world product apart from its identical counterpart? The brand name.

      Imagine an interviewer with a Nike exec, asking why consumers should pay more for their products than a functionally equivalent (maybe even better-built) shoe. I doubt the suit would even acknowledge such a question as being valid. It is not a question companies feel obligated to answer.

      It seems that software companies are behind the game with res

  • This is familiar! (Score:4, Informative)

    by Shoten ( 260439 ) on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @11:19AM (#7510799)
    He must have gone to college with this consultant [satirewire.com].
    • He must have gone to college with

      Except that the Senior VP from HP in the article is a woman. Of course, C|Net certainly buried that by only putting her name+picture in the non-print version of the article and not using her name anywhere in print(I smell something foul here, but anyway).

      Look on the bright side, at least you didn't call -Fiorina- a man(she's probably the best known female executive in the world today aside from maybe Oprah or Martha Stewart. Not that it's a good thing though- she's som

  • Utility computing by another name... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by TopShelf ( 92521 ) on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @11:24AM (#7510844) Homepage Journal
    All credit to this interviewer, who refused to swallow the crap this VP kept spewing (if she said "link to business process" one more time...) and focused on what HP is trying to do that's any different from Sun or IBM. Bottom line - not much!

    That said, I think utility computing is applicable only to a narrow market so far. You need compatability between various applications to host them within a single environment that shares data center resources. When I look around my company (a $1.5 billion worldwide manufacturer), for example, I see dozens of applications on several different operating systems at various versions. How does utility computing address such a heterogeneous environment?

    About the only time she made sense was at the very end:
    "The lines between business and IT are blurring. One CIO told me they don't have IT projects anymore. It's a business project with IT ramifications in it as well as others. "


    How true...

    • Problem of perception on the VPspeak (Score:5, Insightful)

      by siskbc ( 598067 ) on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @12:10PM (#7511235) Homepage
      All credit to this interviewer, who refused to swallow the crap this VP kept spewing

      The VP's real problem is her attitude to information that suggests potential customers don't understand what the hell their AE angle is supposed to be about. When prompted that no customers understood Carly's presentation, she said she thought the customers were wrong and that she thought it was very clear.

      While kissing the boss's ass is usually a good thing, it doesn't matter how clear you think something is - if the customers don't understand it, it's NOT CLEAR. And that's the bottom line.

      The interviewer was a good litmus for that too. He is (presumably) somewhat well versed in IT, had the benefit of asking follow-up questions, and still couldn't figure out what the hell HP is doing. Not good for HP.

      Really, the HP crowd give the impression that they've talked this up so much between each other that it must be gold. Sounds like some serious groupthink. They think they've got this great operation defined by killer buzzwords, we think they're an IBM knockoff with a bad PR campaign.

      If you ask me, it sounds like .Net all over again. What the hell was .Net? I still don't know. They need to learn from IBM - clearly explained yet funny commercials. IBM's commercials tell me their software puts customer data together. HP's tell me that vigilante plus-signs put bad guys in jail. How? I dunno.

      And that's a problem for HP.

  • So basically adaptive computing is just about managing IT resources. What differentiates it is that HP apparently doesn't have a vested interest in any specific technology (year right). They charge you for the privilege of having them tell you how to manage your IT department. I suppose if you can't find good people than it would be worth it, but in this economy?

  • What they're really saying... (Score:5, Funny)

    by barfarf ( 544609 ) on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @11:28AM (#7510872)
    Q: Stripped of all the jargon and market-speak, can you succinctly define what Adaptive Enterprise is supposed to be about?

    A: We proudly adapt to the needs of our enterprise: namely, the CEO, the CIO, and our board members. Screw the rest of the employees and the customers. Aside from that, we really have no idea what the heck we're talking about. We need to make up big words in long sententces to justify our existence in the company. This is the same mindset that allowed us to have fantastic ideas like merging with Compaq, laying off thousands of employees, while giving Capellas the goodbye gift that one can only dream about.

    Q: That could be boilerplate applying to any company. What's the special sauce?

    A: The special sauce is no different than what you find in Burger King. We sit around all day long whacking off in an effort to come up with this sh--.

    Q: Can't you get that by going to any reputable company out there? Sun, IBM--that's what they're about. Am I missing something here?

    A: Nope. They're all the same formula. Same sauce. Right down to the last drop.

  • This is the real gem right here: (Score:5, Funny)

    by Tokerat ( 150341 ) on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @11:30AM (#7510888) Journal

    I disagree that it was unclear. Adaptive Enterprise defines an entity where a company will be able to dynamically readjust to changes that affect its business.
    Soooo...like if I get a new customer I can dynamically readjust my database to reflect the changes that just affected my business? We've never had a machine that could handle SQL INSERT stetements before! What a breakthrough for HP!

    Why do they let people like this run companies, or even speak? I mean christ, MS APIs are more well-understood than that buzzword soup.

    • Soooo...like if I get a new customer I can dynamically readjust my database to reflect the changes that just affected my business? We've never had a machine that could handle SQL INSERT stetements before! What a breakthrough for HP!

      Yes, I'm sure that's what he was talking about. Or perhaps he might have been refering to things like:

      • Legal changes regarding to auditing of customer privacy information
      • Changes to the tax code
      • Changes to your business processes with external entities

      Now, I hate busines

      • OK, who let the Marketing Major in here?

        Now, I hate business-speak as much as the next guy, but the "gem" you quote made perfect sense.

        And the statement quoted is Adaptive Enterprise defines an entity where a company will be able to dynamically readjust to changes that affect its business.

        I am confused as to which part made 'perfect sense'. "Adaptive Enterprise defines (no, it LABELS) an entity (a thing, something that exists as a distinct, independent, or self-contained unit, a being or existence -

        • OK, who let the Marketing Major in here?

          Actually, this was funny. But I am a CS major.

          Oh!!, Ok. Now I see what you ... Wait a minute! How are they going to dynamically readjust to "legal changes reguarding to [sic] auditing of customer privacy information" that affect its business "without having to modify code and recreate applications"? And how does a company dynamically readjust to "changes to the tax code" that affect its business "without having to modify code and recreate applications"?

          If

        • Oh!!, Ok. Now I see what you ... Wait a minute! How are they going to dynamically readjust to "legal changes reguarding to [sic] auditing of customer privacy information" that affect its business "without having to modify code and recreate applications"? And how does a company dynamically readjust to "changes to the tax code" that affect its business "without having to modify code and recreate applications"?

          Easy:
          MS Access and Excel

  • I know parrots who could explain things better.

    Q: Stripped of all the jargon and market-speak, can you succinctly define what Adaptive Enterprise is supposed to be about?
    A: I define AE as a business strategy for customers who want to respond in real time to changes affecting their business.

    So what is it?
    It's a business strategy for customers who want to respond in real time to their businesses. The secret is when you link the business processes together to your IT gear, then you can automatically roll tho

  • PLEASE DON'T RTFA (Score:2, Informative)

    by varjag ( 415848 )
    ... 'cause I did, and now suffer from severe buzzword poisoning.

  • Not nearly as bad as it sounds (Score:5, Insightful)

    by X ( 1235 ) <x@xman.org> on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @11:38AM (#7510967) Homepage Journal
    The slashdot article makes it sound pretty bad, and admittedly c|net doesn't make it look great (honestly I thought this was a case of a bad interviewer, not a good one). However, this is not really that bad.

    AE is more just a term to associate with a different way of looking at the enterprise. While, it is not terribly different from what went on before, it is an evolutionary change. As the HP VP says, it's not a product or a technology, just a way of looking at using technology in an Enterprise.

    I can tell you in the Enterprise space 10 years ago, folks used to get excited about being able to add new products to their IT systems within 6 months (I kid you not). The notion of AE is that it should be measured in days. I'm sure some day it'll be down to hours or even minutes.

    Traditional Enterprise systems were increadibly static and rigid, and over time they are evolving to be much more dynamic and malleable. While this is nothing new to tech folks like us, it's a bit of a wake up call to the business folks who are just getting used to implications of how to mix business and IT based on how things were 5 years ago.

    Again as the VP says, it's not that you can't work towards AE without HP. You can go to anybody for it. His claims about HP's uniqueness are another story (let's face it, all that can be unique when you're talking about providing expertise to execute on an abstract busines strategy is the brand name, and the trust/confidence associated with it).

    So yeah, on one hand it is marketing BS, but on the other hand you need a marketing message in order to communicate to business folks how IT capabilities have evolved and how they can go beyond the existing set of limitations they have come to expect of IT.
    • Oh, so now you're supposed to be able to develop new applications in minutes, for deployment in two days, just because the CEO says so? That must be an adaptive enterprise. Well damn, why didn't she just say so.

      No man, that's a stupid enterprise. If Adaptive Enterprise was described as a strategy and technique for building better communication channels between business and IT within an organization to facilitate rapid rollout of reliable, rock-solid new applications at minimal cost and effort, then why

      • No, the idea is that you don't have to build a whole new application. The idea is that your existing IT infrastructure adapts to the new product without needing a new application. Now, this is an idealized goal, and there are many cases where you can't do this, but it is something that can be done (indeed has been done) for many situations.

        If Adaptive Enterprise was described as a strategy and technique for building better communication channels between business and IT within an organization to facilitate
    • >The notion of AE is that it should be measured in days. I'm sure some
      >day it'll be down to hours or even minutes.

      Um, not to be a jerk, but HOW?
      • Um, not to be a jerk, but HOW?

        Well, if I knew the answer to that I'd be out looking for venture capital. However, there are some obvious pieces of the puzzle needed in order to make that happen. Probably the biggest one is on the IT interface side of things. You'd need a way for the IT system to have business changes communicated to it very quickly and efficiently. This could be through an active interface, something that provides a really clear model of the business such that someone can just manipulate
    • Nope.. that was a good interviewer, since the questions weren't staged so the VP can answer more fluff. The questions tried to probe the REAL reason AE is different, and you can see the VP skirm from dodging the questions, while regurgitating what she said over and over again.

      What would be a good response for the VP? Exactly what you just said :) A good example of how it was then, and what it should be now. The VP couldn't even get to the Target case study for five questions!

      Finally, it's sad that a VP ca
      • Nope... that was a good interviewer, since the questions weren't staged so the VP can answer more fluff.

        Yeah, you know you are seeing an interviewer who's cutting through the fluff when the interviewer (as opposed to the interviewee) introduces terms like "special sauce" and "paradigm shift". ;-)

        I drew my comments entirely from the content in that interview. What's different was that I had a clue about the subject matter, unlike the interviewer. The interviewer's agenda appears mostly to be just to make
    • So it's all about changing business environments to respond to needs faster and more efficiently, or essentialy, one of the goals of every business out there. So what exactly do we need to hire HP for to tell us this?
      • Ugh. I think this gets to the central point that people aren't getting here. AE isn't some proprietary technology that HP has. It's a vision of where your business could be, and HP thinks it has the best products and services to help you get there.

        Given that this is at a high level, there aren't specific products and services out there that make one company better than the other in anything other than trivial ways (you'd laugh pretty hard if I said "Java" or "Itanium" or "HP-UX" wouldn't you?).

        All that an
  • but does it run on Windows?

  • AE = Let HP help you cut your staff (Score:5, Informative)

    by agent_stretch ( 697570 ) on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @11:42AM (#7510998)
    Disclaimer: I was recently laid off as my position was outsourced to HP.

    First, I don't think that the VP ever really answered the questions that were asked. I think the whole point behind trying to sell the Adaptive Enterprise is that it is not something you can clearly define. I'd hate to actually do contract negotiations with them as I'm sure both parties will have different thoughts on what is covered under HP services.

    The whole line about being able to dynamically restructure your IT resources to me means HP can help you figure out how to axe 1/3rd of your workforce and still "adapt" to your business needs. As the interviewer pointed out, aligning IT with your business it nothing new. Hiring outside consultants to help do it is nothing new.

    It begs the question, what is new about adaptive enterprise? Answer: Nothing. I don't see any proof that it is anything more than another marketing strategy designed to sell billable hours and support/consulting contracts.

  • Just a touch of a rant here.... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by PugMajere ( 32183 ) on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @11:43AM (#7511002) Homepage Journal
    From the article:
    I disagree that it was unclear.

    If I say something is unclear, generally, I mean "It is unclear to me." I believe that's true of, oh, everyone, when they say that something is unclear.

    So, I feel obliged to ponder: How do YOU disagree with my opinion that something is unclear?

    Especially when I'm interviewing you saying, in essence, "What the heck is this about?"

    I guess I just hate marketing people.

  • Only the Polygoniest technologies (Score:5, Funny)

    by SolemnDragon ( 593956 ) <solemndragon.gmail@com> on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @11:44AM (#7511013) Homepage Journal
    I cannot read marketing print anymore without imagining it being read aloud by StrongBad. But for further amusement, imagine it being read by:

    A pirate ("Arr, we'll return on yer investment, matey, just hand over the doubloons...")

    A Parrot ("Squawk! Polly wants leverage, polly wants synergies leveraged, squawk!"

    A dog trainer ("Sit, marketing rep! Now, demonstrate CRM, demonstrate CR- SIT! bad rep! Shame on you!")

    Mr. Hainey from Green Acres ( "I bet you'll be wantin' one o' these here market share segments, to go with that product, won'cha?")

    Krusty the Clown ("Hey hey!! Now 'does not cause instant bankruptcy' in every box!")

    Dr. Evil ("I'll give you ten minutes to amuse me. Begin your presentation....NOW.")

    Personally, i think HP is counting on non-technical word of mouth and goodwill, which is why all these ads focus on things like preserving artwork and capturing criminals- if your other managers like the HP ads, they're more likely to approve HP-related spending... and think that it's worth it, even if they don't understand the product or the language describing it.

  • new interview request (Score:2, Interesting)

    by altstadt ( 125250 )

    I'd like to see Charles Cooper interview whoever came up with .Net, too.

    Forget about .net. Get this guy to interview Darl.

  • Arghh Management (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @11:55AM (#7511105)
    Ok, I agree that HP's marketing picture is somewhat muddled, but there is real technology behind what they are talking about. If you want more detail and some whitepapers, you can look here [hp.com].

    The utility computing aspects of the 'adaptive enterprise' are quite real and you can buy it today in the form of the HP Utility Data Center. In a word, UDC is about infrastructure automation - a data center in which you can rapidly deploy (and redeploy) servers and services with no hands-on work, and not requiring you to have a huge, specialized support staff.

    To really have an adaptive enterprise, you need more things layered on top of infrastructure automation, but it is a key building block. Other vendors like Sun and IBM are selling this type of concept, but I think you'll find that HP has more actual products than the competition. HP's marketing does stink though.

  • Adaptive Enterprise.....as explained by the .NET marketing team!
  • It's about time the computer media started holding people's feet to the fire for puking up sylable soup instead of answers. Since I got my first copy of Byte and PC World back in the 80s I've been amazed by how easy the media go on companies:

    * They actually buy into stupid products like MS Bob, Lotus Jazz and the internet appliance doomed to failure of the week. Then they lament the product's demise as being ahead of it's time or too powerfull.

    * They let executives off the hook way too easy:

    Reporter: wh
  • That's right. HP has invested 2.5 billion in R&D of that "Adaptive Enterprise", and all they came up with is a buzzword-spewing VP.

  • HP: "Blah blah blah"

    Cnet:"Look you weenie, we all know you people talk in marketspeak. What are you REALLY saying you pathetic looooooser?"

    SWISH! ZOOM! KAPOW! BUY IBM DB2 PRODUCTS!

    HP:"Uh, what was that?"

    Cnet:"Nothing, you shmuck."

    Pay no attention to the IBM flash ads(or, for that matter, that IBM advertises with Slashdot etc.) Wouldn't it be nice if technical journals held to the same standards as newspapers with regards to journalistic integrity? Then again, i suppose it would be nice if peopl

    • Wouldn't it be nice if technical journals held to the same standards as newspapers with regards to journalistic integrity?

      Um, this is a newspaper, not a tech journal.

    • Hmm. What would you rather have; a system that avoids displaying any ads for the competition on an article about a given company? I don't know what ads came up when I actually read the article, but the ones I saw when I went back and refreshed it were for Intel, Sybase, MS, Dell, and yes, IBM.

      I didn't see anything wrong with the interview. The interviewer asked questions, and demanded straightforward answers. They also had the background to see that this isn't anything different than what Sun, IBM, MS (.NE
  • That vice presidents in charge of whatever can't speak intelligently unless they're barfing up quotes from their own full-page ads in InformationWeek? Who the hell didn't already know that?
  • I listened to the Carly Fiorina webcast on Adaptive Enterprise. Her response to every question about it was like "In the future, everyting will be dynamic and virtual".

    Seriously, what the fuck does that mean?
    • I listened to the Carly Fiorina webcast on Adaptive Enterprise. Her response to every question about it was like "In the future, everyting will be dynamic and virtual".

      Seriously, what the fuck does that mean?


      "In the future, everything will change and won't really exist".

      HTH, HAND,
      --
      *Art
    • .bomb = virtual profit!

      Regrettably when yyou actually want to convert that to cash terms, the result is zero, hense the dot bomb economy. Fiorina should stick to selling ink.

  • HP's special sauce ? [safeshopper.com].

    I'm not sure if it "links business processes together", but it does get quite sticky if you dont clear it up prompty when it spills.

  • Wow (Score:3, Interesting)

    by msuzio ( 3104 ) on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @12:14PM (#7511278) Homepage
    I think I am now dumber having read that interview. Nowhere in that whole page did she say anything resembling a real thought. If I read something about "linking your business practices to your IT" again, I think I would have gone totally zombie.

    Maybe that's the plan. Subliminal hypnosis. Only explanation for a CTO giving any money to HP for this pile of BS.

    Oh, well, back to my own synergistic business initiatives linking IT to the customer base in a proactive fashion.
  • That lack of focus explains a lot. No wonder they are having difficulty selling these [theinquirer.net]

  • Recently at my company we tried to contact HP for more KVM cables for our KVM switch. This is an "older" HP product. Talk about a joke trying to get the product.

    Upon contact support, the only number findable on the website I was transfered to parts and spoke with someone thier. After giving the part number to the lady, she said "I don't know if we still make that product." How can the company not know if they make something anything more. It took her almost a half-hour to try and find the product or

  • the T (Score:4, Funny)

    by sstory ( 538486 ) on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @12:34PM (#7511454) Homepage
    After reading that interview, I feel it's appropriate to quote Mr. T: "Ain't got TIME fo no JIBBA JABBA!"

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @12:47PM (#7511560)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • ..."proven TCO and ROI," a phrase designed for the acronymically inept. You can perhaps prove return on investment (if something repeatedly tends to pay for itself), but isn't total cost of ownership irrelevant without a quantifier? "Low TCO," or "TCO $5000 for lifetime of five years," are actual worthwhile data.
  • ...to questions like "What is SAA?" "what is digital_nervous_system?" "What is (Wang's) Office 2000?" "What is Microsoft Back Office?" "What is .NET?" etc. etc. is always the name of some particular almost-upper-level manager who just got put in charge of some substantial chunk of the organization. In addition to being able to brag about how many thousand people he/she now has "working for him," he/she gets to pick some spiffy name for the grab-bag of projects that he/she now "owns."

    What the grab-bag has i
  • Where is the next generation of RPN calculators for engineers?

    And, *NO*, PDAs or PocketPCs are not adequate substitutes.

    And were Carly Fiorina and Edie Falco separated at birth?

  • Dammit! Just when I thought I'd finally achieved maximum penetration, it seems someone hasn't read my comic strip yet. (See below.)

  • HP isn't selling anything to us... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by tdk2fe ( 666211 ) on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @04:21PM (#7513534)
    I think all this clamor over the way Nora has presented HP's AE exposes the void between management and IT people. The people that have the potential and desire (not to mention the need) to understand what a system like "Adaptive Enterprise" actually is are not the people in charge of whether or not a company is going to adopt that system.

    While HP has made mistakes, they are by no means a stupid company. They pay people a lot of money to tell them what they need to say to make anything sound good. And they know that by using this vague and seemingly cutting-edge vocabulary in their speeches that its going to appeal to those who make the decisions about what sort of system they need to use (IE not engineers working in the IT dept).

    This interview is unique in that a top-ranking VP from HP was forced to answer some technical questions about the way her product works. She probably has no idea how AE works, and you couldn't explain it to her in terms she understands because like many others have said she doesn't understand "tech talk". What she does understand is what to tell the people in charge to get them to buy into her idea. That's her job. When they get a company interested and go to close the sale, they probably send a few techies along with some salespeople to explain to some managers IT pet that their product really is worth it.

    I personally think this interview was unfair. It would be like interviewing a programmer at microsoft about what he see's for the future of the company, what directions they are taking, etc... He'd probably be just as dumbfounded. Before the interview, it even says "CNET News.com recently met with Nora Denzel, senior vice president of HP's Adaptive Enterprise, to find out what she sees on the IT horizon from the computing giant's perspective." I dont recall anything in the interview regarding the future of HP and where they want to go, but instead trying to bleed technical details out of a marketing rep.

    The article should have been titled "Investigation into the details of HP's new Adaptive Enterprise Solutions" and then maybe HP would have been given a fair chance to represent themselves.

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