Enterprises have no control over the mobile devices and platforms that their employees have for their personal use. However, enterprises can exercise control the landscape of mobility devices and platforms used for work related reasons. To do so, enterprises must define their overall mobility strategy and execute upon it in a systematic manner – this is the key message I took away from Darren McGrath's session at HP Discover conference on "Energizing your legacy apps through Mobility."

By PT Umphress, Enterprise Services Global Marketing

Here is a summary of the Enterprise Services blog topics for this past week:

• Virtual Private Cloud Helps Airlines Reduce Capital and Operating Costs
• Delivering on outcomes that matter: John Visentin keynote at HP Discover
• Stouffer Egan turns the tables on computers in keynote address at HP Discover
• A 3-step approach to a mobile-enabled enterprise
• Do you know how to make technology work for you?
• Compass – pointing the way to enterprise collaboration
• 5 Key Points CIOs Must Take Action On Now
• Future-proof your airline with HP Passenger Service Solution
• SiliconAngle's The Cube Discusses Airlines and the Cloud with HP's Brian Cook
• Countdown to disaster: Could you resume critical business processes within 1 hour and 19 minutes?
• BPO’s Social Enterprise Services @ HP Discover
• Applying Enterprise Transformation to Las Vegas at HP Discover
• Discover BPO’s Social Enterprise Services and improving ROI of Social efforts
• 5 points CIOs must take action on now
• Application Transformation: Technology doesn’t move backwards
• Blogging from HP Discover about BYOD
• Dave Donatelli on Taming the Lion with Speed at HP Discover
• Can a SOA Platform-a​s-a-Service Benefit Airlines?
• What do you mean big data, little data is hard enough?
• HP BPO works with OB10 to incorporate e-Invoicing into Source-to-​Pay invoice automation program
• Airline industry taking off into the Cloud at HP Discover
• HP Discover: Making technology work for you – will you be the disrupter or the disrupted?
• New solutions offer powerful options to help enterprise​s on cloud journey
• Can Cloud Computing solve 3 challenges faced by airlines today?
• Top 10 Expectations of the New Creative Class
• HP named an MPS leader in new Forrester report
• Personality-based Application Profiling starts with Mother Nature
• HP Industry Edge e-zine features LCI -- learn about it at HP Discover 2012 Session!
• Planning for Support in a BYOD era.
• Find your Best Bet for Cloud Computing at HP Discover 2012

By Evee Burgard, Travel and Transportation Marketing Manager

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) proved to be especially helpful for the airlines after their IT spend was cut by over 8% in 2009. Airlines are just now beginning to shift from cost cutting to business growth. Read how airlines can use cloud computing as a natural progression to this business shift to create new and unique revenue streams.

"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. A common theme that emerged throughout his presentation were outcomes that mattered to customers whether it be New Zealand recovering from an earthquake disaster or lives being saved by the Navy Marine Corps. Visentin also outlined the manner in which Enterprise Services works with HP customers to bring it all together -- everything that has been talked about at the HP Discover conference keynotes including Dave Donatelli taming the IT lion across servers, storage and networks or Bill Veghte outlining the innovative enhancements and additions made to the HP Software Suite or Stouffer Egan taking the meaning of meaning to the third dimension. To the HP customer, it is all about having a complete solution -- the right solution that directly addresses their business problem in a holistic fashion bringing to bear all the right enabling components that HP has to offer.

For decades now, the human mind has adjusted itself to computers by providing and retrieving structured data in two-dimensional worksheets with constraints on format, data types, list of values, etc. But, this is not the way the human mind has been architected to work. Our minds have the uncanny ability to capture the essence of what is being conveyed in a facial expression in a photograph, the tone of voice or inflection in an audio and the body language in a video. At the HP Discover conference, Autonomy VP for United States, Stouffer Egan showed the audience how software can begin to do what the human mind has being doing since the dawn of time. In a demonstration where Iron Man came live out of a two-dimensional photograph, Egan turned the tables on computers. It is about time computers started thinking like us rather than us forcing us to think like them.

Consumerizaton of IT, BYOD (bring your own device) and mobility have been big topics at this year’s HP Discover conference. Today I talked with HP’s Darren McGrath about mobility in the enterprise, the key associated challenges, and HP’s approach to mobility. Read more about a 3-step approach to a mobile-enabled enterprise.

By Clyde Kesling, Travel and Transportation Marketing Manager

As part of our HP Converged Cloud Services for Airlines announcement, HP is highlighting our HP Passenger Service Solution (HP PSS)—an airline industry solution that focuses on the merchandising, reservation, and travel processes for an airline. HP PSS provides our airline clients with all the basic functionality they need to support the reservation and travel processes used to service their passengers, as well as several other benefits.

On Tuesday, at HP Discover, Brian Cook, vice president and general manager, travel & transportation for HP Enterprise Services discussed the unique challenges of the airline industry with Dave Vellante and Jeffrey Kelly, hosts of SiliconAngle's The Cube. Watch the great conversation that ensued about cloud and how, when it comes to computing, a storm is actually a good thing for airlines.

You work in the data center for a large global company. In 24 seconds, a a major flood is going to hit your data center, but you don’t even know what's coming. How quickly could you recover your business processes in a situation like this?

Today I attended an entertaining and informative session by George Ferguson called “Recovery-as-a-Service: What happens following a disaster," where he walked us through a real-life disaster recovery scenario. 

In technology, we tend not to go backwards. We are constantly working to make technology better and better. Those were the words HP’s Paul Evans used to kick-off the application transformation session at HP Discover yesterday. And while I’d never given the directional movement of technology much thought, I realized that Evans is absolutely correct. We are always looking for better (and sometimes smaller) ways to do things … things that will make our lives easier and make us happier. So how can companies make the shift to accommodate these new technology-savvy customers?

While DreamWorks CEO Jeffery Katzenberg characterized the metaphorical IT lion yesterday in his HP Discover keynote, HP's Dave Donatelli provided substantial detail in his keynote today on how HP is reuniting servers, storage and networks to harness the power of convergence. A common theme emerged from his presentation that empowered this convergence: Speed.

By Evee Burgard, Travel and Transportation Marketing Manager

To IT departments in the airline industry, the benefits of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) are typically aligned to application reuse or project development costs and can produce savings of up to 40%. While these savings might seem noteworthy, when you look at the bigger picture, the total doesn’t quite reach that 40% mark. Read on to find out why.

Lately there is a lot of talk about “big data.” So I decided to attend a session at HP Discover called “Harnessing Big Data” to learn what this is all about. 

I quickly learned that there are four main dimensions of big data:

• Volume
• Velocity
• Variety
• Complexity

So as I waited for the plane to take off for the HP Discover conference in Las Vegas, I begin to think about the state of the airline industry ... where they started years back ... and where they are today. Airlines used to offer all services as part of the single price customers paid when purchasing the ticket. Today, we pay for the ticket and everything else in addition whether it be an extra piece of baggage or in some cases, one more bottle of water. As the aircraft took off into the clouds, I could not help but wonder if this industry could take advantage of the inherent benefits of cloud computing to realize business gains -- business gains that would allow them to improve the overall customer experience for you and me.

This morning’s general session at HP Discover 2012 included HP CEO Meg Whitman discussing HP’s strategy to make technology work for you and DreamWorks’ CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg on the company’s history and innovation in animation.

Federal Computer Week recently surveyed their IT readers about mobility solutions, and mobile printing in particular.  In a nutshell, the research findings support that mobile computing has entered the mainstream of federal agency workflows and I believe that mobile printing will soon follow as a mainstream workflow application.

That makes the announcement from HP today, “HP Expands Converged Cloud Portfolio” especially timely.  Included in the announcement, the new HP ePrint Enterprise 2.0 enables easy, driverless printing from mobile devices to an existing fleet of network printers and now offers integration with three additional pull-printing solutions for added security. 

By Evee Burgard, Travel and Transportation Marketing Manager

Over the past decade, airlines have struggled with the commoditization of their primary offering - airline seating - and are now looking for opportunities to differentiate themselves in a very competitive marketplace. Cloud computing offers that differentiator, as well as numerous other benefits to airlines because it addresses 3 of the main challenges they are facing today.

The last thing I expected to see on stage at the HP Discover conference was a live lion that was not shy about making aggressive moves toward the fellow human beings on stage, including the CEO of DreamWorks, Jeffrey Katzenberg, who delivered the keynote following Meg Whitman’s speech on the future of IT. Katzenberg went on to explain how HP has been a long-standing trusted DreamWorks’ partner in taming the lion that IT represents across the multitude of servers, software, networks, storage and display devices. Here are some fascinating factoids that I gathered during Katzenberg’s speech that substantiated the dramatic “lion” beginning of this keynote.

Wired Magazine editor-in-chief kicked off HP Discover 2012 in Las Vegas with an impactful keynote on consumer IT vs. enterprise IT. He had a great description of the relationship between the trend called “consumerization” and the digital generation of employees that are creative, innovative and offer high potential to the companies where they work. Read on for the top 10 expectations of the new creative class of digital age employees.

On Tuesday and Wednesday in Las Vegas at HP Discover, learn about how the ability for consumers and merchants to make a market statement is unprecedented with the explosion in use of social media, blogs, and an online presence. HP exploits the power of the details by using algorithms to convert all of this information into actionable data. Customer Live Intelligence (CLI) is one solution created by HP Labs that monitors the entire social media spectrum to pull commentary surrounding a given product or entity and reveal what’s really being conveyed by the consumer.

Have you considered the impact BYOD will have on your Support Policies?

CIOs of today are stretched when it comes to the options available in cloud computing. It is not a one answer fits all. Believe it or not, you may want to continue in the traditional environment,  start off with a private cloud environment of your own, have a managed environment or you might bring yourself to kick the tires with a public cloud deployment. As I land in Las Vegas for HP Discover, it almost seems like a decision that one would have to make – just like determining your next call at the blackjack table in your favorite casino. Almost.

So, I am on the flight to Vegas again. Have been there many times before for personal and business reasons. This time, it is for HP Discover 2012 -- the conference where I get to listen to various thought-leaders and experienced practitioners on topics of great interest to me including cloud computing, big data and information analytics. I, myself, will be presenting on multiple topics including the world's first technical standard for cloud computing as well as the concept of profiling applications based on their personalities (or Applities as I call them). As a regular HP blogger, I also intend to post articles and participate in tweet-ups as part of the social media activities planned at the conference. In addition, don't be surprised if I greet you at the HP Enterprise Services Booth in the cloud computing area or the transformation area.