Continuing to push its e-services initiative, Hewlett-Packard Co this week announced a series of strategic alliances with services integrators to help companies optimize their data warehouse environments for the internet. The move is part of HP’s new data warehousing push, the details of which will be revealed next month, said John Santaferraro, HP’s global marketing manager for e-intelligence. Santaferraro declined to elaborate on the initiative although he did say that HP plans to group its data warehousing and business intelligence offerings under a new name, e-intelligence, and that the announcement would be about HP’s plans to link e-intelligence into its e-services strategy. Santaferraro said HP sees a huge opportunity in linking data warehouses with thin clients be they laptops, handheld computers, cell phones or pagers, to enable users to gain access to business critical data whenever they need it. To that end, he confirmed that HP is also planning to ship a series of thin client devices, although he wouldn’t say what, sometime next month.
Marketing terminology aside, this week’s alliances mark the start of HP building out its warehousing offerings. Under the first partnership, with Tanning Technology Corp, HP said it will introduce a data warehouse rescue service for customers whose warehouse implementations have fallen behind schedule or aren’t meeting business needs. A lot [of data warehouses] are either failing, or over budget, or not on time, or not delivering the right service level agreements and business objectives, Santaferraro said. He said both HP and Tanning were already offering similar services, on an ad hoc basis, without formalizing them into official offerings. The service includes a two to three week assessment of a customer’s system, including an overview and analysis of what the company wants to get out of its data warehouse and how it’s currently trying to achieve that. Having decided on a new plan, the data warehouse is then re- implemented and integrated to best fit the company’s needs.
Alongside the rescue service, HP also introduced its HP Impact Analysis for SAP Business Information Warehouse (BIW) – SAP AG’s data warehouse offering. Joe Dabaghian, ERP Business intelligence manager, said the consultancy service is designed to help companies integrate BIW with their existing SAP R/3 environment. HP is offering the service in conjunction with ESI Enterprise Solutions, an ERP integrator which specializes in SAP and e- business re-engineering. The idea is to help companies evaluate the hardware and performance levels required to support SAP BIW. It also gives HP the opportunity to push its servers as the preferred warehouse platform.
In December, HP announced a series of vertical bundles in the data warehousing space including packages for the financial, retail, manufacturing, health and government sectors. Asked why the company hadn’t done much to publicize its presence in the space, Santaferraro said, Because HP is good at execution but a little late in getting the message out, but he added that next month’s announcement was designed to change that perception. As well as outlining its strategy, HP will also form a number of other alliances in the warehousing market over time, he added.
