Reflections: Anthony McMahon, HP
By Staff, ZDNet Asia
Wednesday, January 17 2007 07:31 PM

Anthony McMahon, vice president for enterprise servers and storage, HP Asia-Pacific and Japan, believes the industry should work harder at reducing the environmental impact associated with technology

Q. What do you foresee as the three hottest trends or technologies in 2007?
CIOs and IT managers are being asked even more to justify and assure IT's contribution to achieve growth and competitive advantage for their business. To this end, the hot trends in 2007 will be:

• Business improvement--optimizing the business outcome of IT;
• Information use--capitalizing on business information to improve business performance
• Adaptability--tackling the data center and infrastructure operational costs by moving to an adaptive infrastructure

The key technology solutions to address these trends will be:

• Business improvement--IT service management (ITSM); application lifecycle management (ALM); IT and SOA (service-oriented architecture) governance
• Information use--business Intelligence; information lifecycle management (ILM)
• Adaptive infrastructure--IT consolidation and virtualization; open standards and systems; business continuity and availability; power and cooling; security and automation

Name one issue that you think the industry should collectively work harder to address.
An unwavering commitment to protecting the environment is good for society, but also good for business. The industry needs to collectively work harder at reducing the environmental impact associated with technology, be that power generation and use, right through to recycling and reduction of hazardous materials.

Name one technology past its time.
Given the competitive pressure our CIOs are up against, I think it is not so much that technology is past its use by date, it is that the economics of that technology may no longer pass the test. As enterprises are looking to increase business agility and performance, reduce operational cost, and mitigate risk, they are moving applications to open standards-based server environments. HP, Intel and Oracle recently announced a joint initiative called the Application Modernization Initiative, which helps customers to modernize their legacy application portfolios running on legacy mainframes. The initiative uses SOA principles and enterprise grid computing platforms that provide increased reliability and efficiency.