How HP Discover made IT matter for me

[#1]

As I geared up to travel to the HP Discover 2012 conference held in Las Vegas, the cliche "What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas" came to mind.  However, when I thought about the  wealth of information I was going to be exposed to and the opportunities to network with various HP customers, partners, thought leaders as well as my colleagues across HP, I figured "What happens in Vegas does not stay in Vegas !"  Now that I am back home from Vegas, I look back at HP Discover and wonder what is it that "did not stay in Vegas after the conference?"  What did I take away that I would like to share with everyone?

Answer: How HP Discover made IT (Information and Technology) matter for me.

Let us see how:

In her keynote speech, HP CEO Meg Whitman shared HP’s purpose to advance the way people live and work. “We do that by making technology work for you,” she told the audience. One such example was demonstrated live by the Autonomy VP for US, Stouffer Egan who showed us how technology can be made to work to extract the information from data  by making software do what the human mind has being doing since the dawn of time. It is about time computers started thinking like us rather than forcing us to think like them when dealing with information.   

DreamWorks CEO, Jeffrey Katzenberg defined and explained how HP, DreamWorks and Intel are collaborating to tame the IT lion. Speed was the underlying theme as HP’s Dave Donatelli showed how HP is reuniting servers, storage and networks to harness the power of convergence. Complementing Dave’s presentation on technology that enables infrastructure, HP’s Bill Veghte walked through the comprehensive coverage provided by HP’s Software Suite to reinforce Meg Whitman’s comment in her keynote: “We are not in the software business to transform HP into a software company. We are in the software business to help you solve your toughest problems.”

“When you need us most, we are there for you," said HP Enterprise Services VP, John Visentin in his keynote at the HP Discover conference where he detailed how the HP Services organization brings it all together, delivering on outcomes that matter to HP customers.

In the spirit of making IT matter, the Airline Industry took off into the Clouds at HP Discover.

As I flew into the clouds before landing in Vegas, I collected my thoughts around the topics I presented at the HP Discover 2012 conference:

• Find your best bet for Cloud Computing at HP Discover
• Mother Nature is into profiling Applications too

I presented a total of five different track sessions across these topics on all 3 days of the conference:

• World's first Technical Cloud Computing Standard
• Profile your applications at HP Discover  

It was a unique experience to present the same topic multiple times to different audiences posing a completely different set of questions each time. One such customer had a prolonged discussion on the Transformation Experience Workshop that the Services Pavilion had to offer. This prompted me to wonder about applying Enterprise Transformation to the City of Las Vegas.

HP Labs made IT matter with their innovative injections across the technology spectrum. In this video post, HP Fellow Partha Ranganathan outlines how HP Labs is inventing the future data-centric data center.

All in all, a wonderful experience where the comprehensive application of innovative technology across the lifecycle has energized me to work in a world as defined by Katzenberg: where creativity and innovation meet to enable one to work at the speed of imagination. IT does matter. HP Discover 2012 showed me how.

Follow all of the HP Discover Event Buzz to find out what really happened in Vegas!

[#2]

I was also interviewed multiple times on SDRNews.com by Andy McCaskey at the conference.  Here are the links to those interview sessions:

• Profiling Applications for Enterprise Transformation
• Will you be the first to adopt the first Cloud Computing Technical Standard?
• Does your House of IT need an Extreme Makeover?
• Bring it all together at HP Discover