HP recently unveiled its vision for the Instant-On Enterprise, organisations that embed technology into everything they do in order to better address the rapidly changing needs of customers and citizens. The company also announced new integrated solutions that help businesses and governments create their own Instant-On Enterprise.
With the adoption of mobile and cloud computing, everything is becoming connected and immediate. As a result, customers and citizens expect responses in seconds and “instants,” instead of weeks and days.
“The Instant-On Enterprise vision is focusing more on business customers (enterprises) and their need to react instantly to market or business environment changes or opportunities,” Franz Scherz, managing director and enterprise business manager CDG at HP told i-Tech.
“With this hyper-connectivity of customers and consumers comes an infinite number of new touch points between business and consumer, government and citizen. This, coupled with an explosion of information, provides billions more places to start the conversation. This fundamentally changes how goods and services are purchased and received. Social media, the consumerist nature of IT, and changing demographics are fundamentally changing how work gets done in enterprises.”
New research conducted on behalf of HP reveals the role of IT is shifting from chiefly being the administrator of the enterprise, to becoming one and the same with the enterprise. HP said it will be helping organisations reinvent their use of technology to deliver innovation at every point in the value chain within the enterprise. This includes the services that are delivered, the mobile devices that provide the access, and the global data centres required to power the Instant-On Enterprise.
“We found that most enterprises have set up their company structures, processes and IT systems coming from historical needs where decisions took longer and opportunities also lasted longer. To gain competitive or service advantage in the face of these new customer and constituent patterns requires technology to be at the very forefront of enterprise innovation and growth. This reminds me on a statement from Rupert Murdoch: ‘The world is changing very fast. Big will not beat small anymore. It will be the fast beating the slow’,” said the HP top executive.
Malta is no exception to what’s happening in the rest of the world and HP takes notice of this.
“HP is investing into the Maltese market in various ways and we see good opportunities for Malta to use IT as one of the ways being more easily integrated with EU or the worldwide business,” added Mr Scherz. “Especially the fact that companies there are smaller and the problems on local market are limited enables Malta to be faster and more competitive on international markets with products and services based on IT. We are happy to help the local society to address these opportunities faster and more profitable.”
HP recognises that most of the Maltese enterprises are micro businesses, and a few are small-to-medium in size (SMB). It sponsors special programmes for small and medium enterprises. One of them is a training programme also available in Malta to help SMB customers to understand how to use IT for their business benefit. Last week HP, the Malta Information Technology Agency (MITA), the University of Malta, and the Malta College of Arts, Science and Technology (MCAST) signed the memoranda of understanding to create two educational centres in Malta within 2011. The aim of this strategic collaboration is to provide students studying ICT with access to the latest information technologies and knowledge databases.
One sector where HP wants to be present is the Maltese public sector, where, e-government services are rated as among the best in Europe by international benchmarking surveys.
“We know and appreciate the efforts made by the Maltese government in term of e-government. HP supports governments with various solutions, services and products helping them to run a state like you run a big enterprise. Apart from e-government solutions, we also offer solutions tailored for financial management, healthcare, education and defence because needs for all of them changed dramatically over the last years,” explained Mr Scherz. More information about HP’s new offerings is available at www.hp.com/go/InstantOnEnterprise2010