FOSE: HP Panel Describes 'Perfect Storm' For Government IT

The panelists outlined the challenges: the improvement of department operations and processes, supporting change initiatives, controlling costs, managing environmental impacts and expanding the use of information across government.

"The government of the United States is one of the most complex enterprises we find," said Suparno Banerjee, vice president and leader of Electronic Data Systems' global government industry group (EDS was bought by Hewlett-Packard last year). "The pace of change and the volume of change -- managing that is going to be paramount. Technology no longer supports government -- it powers government."

The four HP and EDS panelists -- Banerjee; Dennis Stolkey, senior vice president of public sector at EDS; Willie Coleman, HP's director of civilian agencies; and HP Fellow and Director of HP Labs' Sustainable Ecosystem Lab Chandrakant Patel -- stepped in at the last minute to replace previously scheduled speaker Ann Livermore, executive vice president of HP's services organization, who Stolkey said was ill.

Banerjee called the current climate for government IT a "perfect storm" of financial pressures, internal pressures, constituent pressures and environmental pressures -- "four immutable forces coming together."

"The only way out of this is innovation," Banerjee said. "Agencies are expected to do about 18 percent more work than ever, and that was prestimulus."

Coleman and Patel used their part of the discussion to show how HP was planning to innovate through what Coleman called a "standardize, optimize and automate" mindset. HP was attempting to apply that to everything from servers and storage to cloud computing infrastructure and, as Patel demonstrated, reaching an ideal of the next-generation, energy-friendly data center.

"It's not about paying more, it's about paying less," Patel suggested, describing ideal "City 2.0" architecture as one that, through policy-based control and operation, knowledge discovery, pervasive sensing infrastructure and scalable, convertible resource microgrids, could help cities manage power, transport, water and waste.

"As we design our products, we must look at energy use across the life cycle," Patel said. "How much energy is required to extract? To manufacture? To operate? To reclaim? The data center is the core of the IT ecosystem, and the next-generation data center requires attention to both the supply side and the demand side."