Hewlett Packard is campaigning for the adoption of HP converged infrastructure technology by governments in East Africa. The HP Converged Infrastructure is a next-generation IT architecture that converges virtualized compute, storage and networks with facilities into a single environment optimized for any workload.Inside, all resources and processes are controlled by a shared-services engine that provisions and adapts application environments to instantly respond to business demands.

This architecture helps businesses accelerate the delivery of application environments in a predictable, repeatable way that makes the most efficient use of IT, facility and staff resources to drive business innovation.  
“We believe this strategy will help business unleash their full to potential to deliver any application, anywhere, on the fly, flex resources on demand in an optimized way, unleash productivity of administrators, systems and facilities and provide predictable continuity of service”, said Hewlett Packard East Africa Managing Director Ken Mbwaya.
According to Mbwaya, the East Africa governments have an opportunity to cut down on their operational expenditure by over 70 per cent with the implementation of shared services.
Mbwaya said shared services have helped governments to become efficient and effective in their service provision to the public and even assists in faster conclusion of government businesses.
“Tomorrow’s business will be built on converged infrastructure and HP brings all this together through consolidating the networks, servers, storage, power and cooling systems and management of software giving you an optimized solution to power your business.”
At the same time, Christian Keller, Head of Industry Standard Servers, ISS Europe Middle East Asia and Africa said HP has invested billions of dollars on Intellectual Property, open integration and in-house expertise to assist its clientele in accessing the service even via cloud computing.
“When looking closer at the data centre, the cost of operations has absorbed a huge portion of the IT budget up to 70 per cent (includes both support and maintenance) – leaving little budget for more strategic or innovative needs. Enterprises clearly need to reduce the total amount of resources that are focused on operations and maintenance and free up resources to work on more strategic, innovative tasks.”
Keller said there was need to rapidly respond to business and customer needs in order to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.
“Businesses are expected to improve service levels and make IT more responsive to the needs of the business. Today, we see a long delay to business value. In addition we see that business agility is constrained. Changes need to be made to address the fact that companies have too many applications, too much customization, and too much complexity.”
He added that there was also need to better manage risk and enhance the quality of services to enable business success.

“To do this they need to ensure business continuity and protect their resource and data assets against a growing range of security threats. This will not only increase quality of service but also help companies meet corporate mandates and government regulations.”
To address these challenges suffered by data centres, Keller advised the businesses to break down the Silos- automate error prone manual processes and tighten management control.
“They need to bring together hardware, software and services to create next-generation data centres that operate more efficiently. There is a better way. When we talk power and cooling, or virtualization or management, it's not just for the product itself, but for the entire data centre. We call our strategy, the HP converged infrastructure. And we wholeheartedly believe this is the way the data centres of the future are going to get built.”
This convergence is not just about the virtualization of servers, storage systems, and network connections. Convergence also requires bringing together management tools and processes so resources can be managed in a holistic, integrated manner.  In addition, to tackle the growing complexity and cost of energy, the next generation data centre needs to synergistically link power, cooling and facilities with IT.