Today, HP Launches Industry’s Most Complete Software-defined Network Fabric for Cloud. This network fabric is built on HP FlexNetwork architecture, enabling business agility for clients by delivering two times greater scalability and 75 percent less complexity over current network fabrics while reducing network provisioning time from months to minutes.

This is possible by:

• Improving IT productivity by unifying the virtual and physical fabric with new HP FlexFabric Virtual Switch 5900v software, which, in conjunction with the HP FlexFabric 5900 physical switch, delivers advanced networking functionalities such as policies and quality of service to a VMware environment. Integrated Virtual Ethernet Port Aggregator (VEPA) technology provides clear separation between server and network administrations to deliver operational simplicity.
• Reducing data center footprint with the HP Virtualized Services Router (VSR), which allows services to be delivered on a virtual machine (VM), eliminating unnecessary hardware, by leveraging the industry's first carrier-class software-based Network Function Virtualization (NFV).

As organizations move to software defined networks, some fundamental changes in the approach will be required and these products are a start down that path. Here is a video with a bit more high level discussion and some details:

This week I was talking with some of the leaders at the SMU business school curriculum advisory group for Information Technology and Operations Management. During the meeting, we had a discussion about the differences between service organizations and product companies in the areas of governance, finance and HR. Sometimes these differences can be jarring for someone (or whole companies) moving from a product market to the services market or vice versa.

Services have definitely become the largest part of the GDP for many countries.

One of the most obvious differences has to do with personnel. For a product organization, people can be considered overhead and a resource that needs to be minimized. For many types of service organization, what is actually being sold is access to people and process. If you have no people, you have nothing to sell. Having a bench is what gives the organization the flexibility to grow. With the increase in analytics, more of these knowledge worker roles may be automated, but that just focuses the individuals on higher value activities.

The governance in the services space is also quite different. For IT roles as an example, there are industry processes and methodologies like ITIL or CMMi that the industry accepted as a constituent, best practice to produce work products enabling business leadership to make better and more consistent decisions.

SMU is defining an IT management certification executive education program to strengthen the understanding of leaders concerning best practices. Since IT is only a small part of the leadership within most organizations, this kind of external program seemed to be a good idea to focus on the skills an IT leader needs. I tried to get them to make it an on-line course, but that is not likely to happen, at least at this point.

I was thinking about writing a post about the history of HP Discover, but realized that most within IT are actually more worried about the future than interested in the past.

The IT industry behavior is definitely changing. We’re moving from a focus on cost savings and RFP driven engagements between companies and suppliers into an environment that is more consumption-based. Where nearly anything in IT can be purchased “as-a-service”. This allows for a much more business-led approach, focused on business value generation, yet with a demand for a relatively short return on investment. This leads to many asking for advice on what they should do or just a level-set on what is actually happening and what others are doing.

HP Discover 2013 in Las Vegas is an opportunity to interact with others and see where HP is focusing its efforts. If you want to see what it is like, you can see highlights from Discover Frankfurt in 2012. Or visit the full HP Discover Session Catalog to see where HP Discover 2013 is focused and the sessions that matters most to you and your business.

There is even a blogging community developing where you can get the inside scoop - Buzz

Four of the big trends organizations want to know more about today are: mobility, analytics, cloud services (flexible resource acquisition) and security. All of these will be covered by multiple sessions from multiple perspectives. Nadhan put out a post the other day on how CIOs can get their priorities right at HP Discover 2013 in Vegas , the approach he descibesmay also be of interest.

Follow HP Discover at:

•  @HPDiscover Twitter
• HP Discover LinkedIn Group
• HP Discover on FaceBook

I mentioned a while back that BYOD is not really about devices but about controlled, yet flexible access to corporate information. The use of mobile devices is transforming how we think of work and the workplace. That is why HP is announcing the Enterprise Cloud Services – mobility as part of a wide range of Enterprise Cloud Services.

I had to chuckle a bit when I saw Seth’s introduction to this video, since he and I have talked about these issues for a very long time.

In the end it gets back to the fact that organizations need to be able to balance mobile user demands with IT control requirements. Offerings like this enable businesses to be more flexible and accelerate their time to value…enabling global delivery and robust security features that ensure data on the device, in-transit, and stored is always protected.

I recently came across an HP labs video on the excitement of one of the researchers on next wave developing to compute and gather information.

It shows some of the efforts to be more efficient and yet more powerful. Innovation’s role is in resolving conflicts like this, and that’s exciting.

The whole industry is at a tipping point where new generations of capability will be arriving simultaneously for computing, storage, networking and sensing… which should allow for a novel, innovative dimension of applications and services to take advantage of the new abilities and generate new levels of business value.