Rick Slade, C&I Enterprise Application Services solution practice lead

Through their Application Modernization Services, Hewlett-Packard offers large organizations leading, industry-standard technology solutions that deliver greater simplicity, agility and business value through a complete set of analysis, implementation and post-implementation services, technologies and partnerships to modernize complex, costly, yet valuable legacy technologies. To learn more, we talked to Rick Slade, their Consulting & Integration Enterprise Application Services solutions practice lead.

How can legacy apps limit a firm’s business agility and create escalating IT costs, Rick?

Architecture. Service-oriented architecture is needed to enable agility and manage costs. Frankly, legacy or monolithic architectures can prevent your organization from reacting quickly to changing market demand and regulatory requirements. The costs of maintaining these applications are high because of the time required to make changes due to their tightly coupled architecture.

Do senior managers see modernization as a priority?

Yes, they recognize that their business is being limited by legacy systems and need to modernize and move to a more adaptive enterprise. Load and performance requirements aren’t the hurdles they once were, but providing the same level of reliability, availability and security they’re accustomed to from their legacy environment – that’s the challenge most organizations face when looking at application modernization.

How many companies has HP moved from mainframe-based to more open, standards-based IT environments?

Over 100, actually.

Can you provide us one example in the financial sector?

Using .NET, the Business Process Management division of a major financial services organization built a state-of-the-art workflow management solution in only six months, one-third the time it would have taken using Java. Based on XML and XML Web services, they have delivered 80 percent lower software costs, 95 percent lower hardware costs and a 50 percent reduction in the time required to bring new customers online. It has also delivered a 15 percent productivity gain for their 600-person call center, equivalent to a labor-cost savings of $2.7 million per year.

Point blank, why HP?

HP combines a set of attributes that contribute to our ability to deliver the maximum business value with minimum risk. We work collaboratively with an enterprise’s business and IT professionals in a team with shared objectives and definitions of success.

Our ability to determine and manage capacity needs on HP platforms is unmatched, we believe, and our ability and history in delivering production application management solutions through products like HP OpenView give clients the assurance they need in knowing that their business-critical applications will execute in the same reliable manner they’ve been accustomed to, but on a platform less expensive to operate, under an architecture that allows them the ability to react faster.

Sounds like a complete approach.

Actually, it’s a rather holistic view encompassing every aspect of the business technology environment – data, applications, hardware and infrastructure. Our integrated global delivery capabilities enable improved business performance when and where you need it at a competitive cost through right-shoring.

How does HP’s record of innovation factor into the decision-making process?

It’s all about business and technology innovation. Our record for innovation continues to enable businesses to gain significant benefits from new technologies and services.

What degree of multi-vendor expertise do you bring to the equation?

We have expertise and deep project experience across a variety of platforms and applications to reduce customer risk and speed in completion of a customer’s migration.

Are you platform-neutral?

Yes, with choices at every level. From applications to databases, from middleware and messaging, to operating systems and processors, we can help combine investments in the best technology solutions to drive business value.

What about risk?

We use industry-standard architectures, modular components and consistent implementation of standards-based business and IT processes. By embracing standards across the IT environment, we not only reduce risk – we provide operating and management simplicity, and the greatest degree of flexibility to grow, add new services and features and update as the business grows and evolves.

For more information, visit http://www.hp.com.