Companies are still spending up to 70% of their IT budgets on infrastructure and application maintenance, which is severely impacting their ability to support new business opportunities. It's no surprise we hear the cries of 'IT doesn't matter!' from the boardrooms of these organizations. HP is addressing this imbalance by investing in enterprise software innovations. Innovations such as open source software, web services and utility computing are changing the competitive landscape, reducing operational costs and providing a new dimension of opportunities that have previously been inaccessible. Shane Robison, Chief Strategist for HP, shares his company's views on the enterprise software landscape and what they are doing to support the adaptive and real-time enterprise.

While HP is divesting from some software markets it has been strategically acquiring companies to fill the missing pieces of its enterprise software strategy. A strategy that is established around the principles of management software built on a combination of commercial and open source software. HP has invested heavily in innovation through its HP Labs division, which has contributed substantially in SOA, SAAS (software as a service), grid and utility computing. The goal is to build software that will help businesses better manage their diverse IT resources and provide timely key business performance indicators back to their executives.

This is a very revealing talk on how HP is using innovation, acquisition and partnering to carve a niche in the enterprise software market.

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Shane Robison is responsible for shaping HP's overall corporate strategy and technology agenda. He steers the company's nearly $4B R&D investment as well as fostering the development of the company's 25,000 plus technical community. All of the company's senior CTOs and the director of HP Labs report into Robison. Shane also leads the company's strategy and corporate development efforts including mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, IP licensing, VC community, and partnerships. He was one of four principal architects of the HP/Compaq merger and in 2004, InfoWorld declared Robison one of the worlds 25 most influential Chief Technology Officers.

Robison was senior vice president and chief technology officer of Strategy and Technology at Compaq Computer Corporation. Prior to joining Compaq, Robison was president of Internet Technology and Development at AT&T Labs. While at AT&T, he led a 2,000-person team that was responsible for the architecture, planning and development of all of AT&T's Internet technologies and services.

This program is from the Software 2005 series.

For Team ITC:

• Description editor: Jim Alateras
• Post-production audio engineer: Paul Figgiani