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Arun Oberoi, HP’s vice-president (Worldwide Software Sales and Marketing) talks to BT’s Ashutosh Sinha on the company’s non-hardware thrust. Q. Mr Oberoi, how did HP get into the software business?
Our business is integrated with the HP ecosystem and yet it is independent of HP. The intent is to maximise the best of both worlds. These are not mutually exclusive to us. We need to be successful in both. Our business last year grew at nearly 45 per cent. This year, we have taken steps to ensure a similar growth. Instead of selling software as a licence, we have recently started software as a service.
You mean the ASP model? The application service provider model, managed service provider model and so on. It can be scaled up faster with the help of, let’s says, a few network operating centres where you can manage millions and millions of objects around the world. How much of HP’s software initiative is rooted in India? A fair amount. In fact, every division within the company is a user of the Indian Software Operations (ISO) based in Bangalore, which has nearly 1,000 people. In addition to that, we have virtual linkages with a host of other companies that provide services to ISO. However, we do have major software operations in California, Germany. We are doing some work in China. We are doing a lot of work in Eastern Europe. Is China that big a place to be for offshore software development? It is getting to be that way. They want to be recognised and they have a lot of government-sponsored initiatives. It is getting to be there, slowly but surely. Which are the big areas that ISO is contributing in a big way for HP? There are two things we are focusing on as a company. One is to make sure that your infrastructure is "always on". Second, we give you the technology to transform your business (for the networked world). We have optimised the code to measure where the customer is experiencing the latency, whether it is the firewall or the back-end. They have a way to fix the latencies. For all this, we keep acquiring companies, typically small ones. Are you planning any acquisitions in India? We have not acquired any companies in India, though we are looking at a few. What kind of companies are you looking at? Technology-centric companies. We are actively looking in India and other parts of the world as well. Recently, in addition to buying companies, we have also invested for a stake in small companies. When you do this, you don’t have to worry about various issues. Will you do that in India as well? We are doing that across the world and I am sure we will do that in India as well. What space would you look at in India? I can’t tell you which spaces because we are taking a look at so many companies. The problem with Indian companies is that most of them do work around services and consulting. There are not too many product companies. So, in terms of product companies, we have less of an option in India at this point. But HP is doing some very high-end work out of India. The unfortunate part is that we, in India, we have not done work in product-enabling our thinking. |
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Nearly three years ago, we decided that we
wanted to be in the software business as a business too. But this is very
different from being in the software business as just a solutions
provider. We wanted to be in the software business in the across-platform
sense. We set out a time to develop sales and marketing across platforms.
Today, nearly 55-60 per cent of our business (for the software operations)
comes from outside the HP-fold. And, in fact, that business is growing
much more rapidly than the business within the HP ecosystem.