Frank Rauch did his best Oprah Winfrey impersonation at XChange Americas 2011, surprising an audience of solution providers with free HP TouchPad tablets.
Rauch, vice president of channel sales for HP's Enterprise Storage Server Networking (ESSN) division, took the stage Thursday during an XChange Tech Symposium to discuss HP's mobility play and ended his presentation by surprising the crowd with vouchers for HP TouchPad's.
While tablets have been largely viewed as a consumer device, Rauch explained how a TouchPad and other mobile devices fit into a larger ecosystem that includes cloud computing. Rauch said HP believed in "consumerization, cloud and connectivity" -- as mobile consumer devices start to take over IT and infiltrate the workplace, businesses will need enhanced connectivity and cloud support.
Rauch compared the mobility boom to previous trends like the dot com boom, Y2K, and HIPAA, which shook up the industry and drove major business for vendors and solution providers alike. "I believe we have the next chasm right now [in mobility]," he said. "In fact, I know we have the next chasm."
In terms of HP's own mobility play, Rauch promoted the TouchPad and, more specifically, its operating system. He said WebOS, the mobile operating system HP acquired through its purchase of Palm, is ideal for enterprise use because it has better security, stability and synchronization features than the competition. "WebOS will become ubiquitous and it will become pervasive," he said.
Rauch closed by saying that the HP partners that are going to win long term are the ones that will be able to "knit together" the trends of mobile devices, connectivity and cloud computing.
Also appearing during Thursday's XChange Tech Symposium was APC, which focused on data center infrastructure management software, or DCIM. Alan Braish, DCIM software consultant at APC, discussed how DCIM can help control users' data centers with a host of capabilities and features such as monitoring, measuring and alerting; support and energy management; and software services.
As for the partner opportunities around DCIM, Braish said solution providers can sell and integrate the management software itself, provide consulting services around DCIM, and also offers support services in relation to the software's reporting. As a result, APC's DCIM software can lower clients' data center energy costs and reduce data center "babysitting time" for IT staff, for example. Braish said the DCIM market is growth, citing data from Gartner that predicts the software will growth 60 percent by 2014.
