SVPMA Monthly Event - Evolving from Products to Product Suite Solutions in High-Tech with Brian Cox, Sr. Director, HP September 3, 2008

Organization: SVPMA - Silicon Valley Product Management Association
Topic: Evolving from Products to Product Suite Solutions in High-Tech
Speaker: Brian Cox, Sr. Director, Hewlett-Packard
Date: Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008
Time: 6:30pm - 9pm
Location: Network Meeting Center at the TechMart - 5201 Great America Parkway, Santa Clara
Cost: Free for Members. $20 for pre-registered Non-Members. $25 at the door.
More info: http://svpma.org/meetings.html

Presentation:
This presentation will discuss why the bundling of enterprise software products has proven successful in growing revenue for HP and in improving satisfaction from its customers. The example used for this discussion will be on the development and roll out of the software bundles called “Operating Environments” for HP’s Unix system software offering.

Operating Environments for HP-UX 11i originally launched in December 2000, providing commonly used layered applications (also known as system middleware) integrated and tested with the HP-UX operating system. Delivered as single SKUs, the concept proved successful for customers who could standardize on a particular Operating Environment and gain the benefits of simplified selection, installation provisioning and maintenance patching. For HP, Operating Environments improved software attach rates & revenues, and shortened the sales cycle.

Two years ago, HP began the process of bringing out the next generation of Operating Environments which would be based on version 3 of HP-UX11i. The team responsible for developing the new Operating Environments worked closely with customers, field engineers, and sales people to determine the optimal components and structure. The challenge was to integrate complex technologies such as virtualization and high availability software with the ideal of simplicity and stability that was the strength of the Operating Environment concept. A number of issues involving engineering, licensing, and revenue had to be overcome.

Ultimately, HP was able to provide a new structure that streamlined customers choice between high availability, virtualization, or both while improving their total cost of ownership. Customers established on the older platforms were given a smooth and advantageous transition, accelerating adoption of HP-UX’s latest operating system version which ultimately lowered HP’s support costs and strengthened profit margins. The presentation will explain the process of implementing and showing the benefits of this product bundling approach.

Speaker:
Brian Cox is the Senior Director of Software Planning and Marketing for Business Critical Systems at the Hewlett-Packard Company. In this role he is responsible for product planning, product management and product marketing for the HP-UX 11i, OpenVMS, Linux & Windows operating systems and associated virtualization, high availability, storage management & development tool software for Integrity, Alpha and HP 9000 servers.

In his HP career, Brian has managed the industry’s best selling UNIX servers, the industry’s highest-performing Windows and Linux servers, the first blade server from any major vendor and multiple generations of x86, RISC and Itanium-based servers. His products have earned numerous awards over the years from publications such as InfoWorld, Network World, IT Week, Byte and Windows NT Magazine.

Brian holds B.S. and MBA degrees from Santa Clara University.

Official Website: http://www.svpma.org