HP emphasizes Business Intelligence Solutions

An overview of the Business Intelligence Solutions (BIS) group of HP was given by John Santaferraro, Senior Director of Marketing Communication and Industry Marketing, plus on the phone was Simone Burrows, Director of Health & Life Sciences Solutions and Rob Simonds, Director of Communications, Media, & Entertainment. He talked about partnerships with Informatica to resell their products "on HP paper" and SAP with integration of NeoView with NetWeaver Business Warehouse. An overview of BIS is given here as a 4-page PDF.

John was asked about the number of NeoView customers. Based it is HP's policy not to report customer numbers at the division level, he was not able to state numbers but mentioned the case of Woolies in Australia as an example of a large retail customer who is publicly pleased with NeoView. In January, HP & Microsoft announced that they have jointly allocated $250M to support joint activities for R&D, product development and go-to-market. These funds came from reallocation from other HP partnership that are of lower priorities (such as Oracle). Using the sensor technology in HP printers, HP is partnering with Shell Oil to apply that technology to high-resolution seismic data collection in drilling operations. As we discussed HP's professional service, the previous Knightsbridge is now part of BIS and offers full-spectrum consulting for a BI implementation, in contrast to EDS whom is relatively independently operated.

He then addressed HP's position for BIS. The key statement is... "HP is a complete provider of enterprise-class, industry-specific, business intelligence solutions." He asked, "What companies can to this?" Merv remarked, "two or three vendors can claim this, but many more vendors can claim that they can deliver a complete set with partnerships. HP is in the latter."

We discussed the organizational fragmentation across HP major groups, such as EDS. John admitted that "it take time" citing the ups/downs of the Compaq acquisition. It is just very difficult process to integrate major acquisition, as Claudia observed.

Simone and Rob gave an overview of BI solutions for the Health and Life Sciences. There are five areas: customer experiences, care management, cost/revenues intelligence, connected healthcare stakeholders, and compliance improvement ...and each solution has different flavors for payers, providers, health services and BioPharma. Simone focused on Care Management area. Given that 10% of patients account for 70% of health expenses, it is important to the insurer and to the healthcare system to monitor processes and outcomes to discover better care procedures. She remarked, "BI-enabled Care Management: solutions from HP is the largest provider of healthcare management services doing 2.5B transactions annually." The example of Blue Cross Blue Shield in Kansas City was cited.

During the break, Merv was jammin'. He is great!  

John continued with a status report on NeoView, which was mostly confidential. He asked what HP printer and HP NeoView has in common. Neil quipped "Oh God, do I have to change the drives every week?" :) The greatest energy cost is cooling the data center, with the processor boards accounting for 13% of that cooling cost. A NeoView update is scheduled for mid year but the details are confidential. New hardware, in contrast to new software, is driving innovations data warehousing platforms and applications.

John ended with several nuggets of futures for HP. It was mostly questions to ponder, not just from HP's perspective but from a entire industry perspective.