HP's Livermore Pitches 'Transformative Change' In IT

Livermore, speaking on the first day of Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco Monday, pitched HP's broad portfolio of hardware, software and services in making the case that organizations seeking to grow in a resurgent economy should think of IT in terms of streamlining its deployment and automating more tasks throughout the IT environment.

"Anything we can do to automate tasks using software is important for us to deliver," Livermore said, describing the application of this philosophy throughout the IT environment, from automated power and cooling management in the data center to change management on the desktop.

Livermore also bemoaned the cost of maintaining legacy applications, claiming that in many organizations, 70 percent of IT spending is directed toward maintenance of "millions of lines of brittle, sensitive legacy code," and just 30 percent is directed toward "innovation."

The solution, she said, is to buy products and services from Palo Alto, Calif.-based HP, which offers same via direct sales, a partner channel and now through enterprise outsourcing with Electronic Data Systems (EDS), acquired by HP last year and recently redubbed HP Enterprise Services.

Livermore also stressed her host's role in this future landscape of maximum convergence, noting early on in her keynote that 40 percent of Oracle installations are on HP systems throughout the world.