Enterprise software is a hell of a lot more than racks of web servers and managing licenses for Microsoft Office. Any publicly traded company, even one that is not a software company, has tons of business processes that are specific to its way of doing business and its industry. That requires various specialized if not custom software and lots and lots of glue to put it all together. On top of that, businesses want to see into all that activity so all the data from that software needs to be extracted, collected, combined, and reported on properly which requires technical and business expertise specific to that company's business practices and technology choices. The addition of more cloud services increases this burden while decreasing other burdens.
HP makes lots of money through EDS selling consulting services and outsourcing services to do all that stuff. Stuff that is being fed by the move to more and more cloud services whether internal or external.
And when I say enterprise services, I mean software as a service stuff like Salesforce. There are more services that business need than Salesforce such as data warehousing that HP is in a strong position to enter or dominate. That said, even though something like Salesforce is a turn key solution hosted off site, it doesn't mean there isn't an enterprise sales process. A middle manager doesn't buy up 1,000 seats of Salesforce subscriptions at $65 per month without going through the normal enterprise approval process. I've seen it and it can take several months even though your average small business owner can sign up in 10 minutes with a corporate credit card. The real deal involves contract scrutiny and due diligence work. And just because Salesforce is easier, it doesn't mean you don't need a ton of development and integration work to bring it in line with your existing practices and software tools which usually requires outside experts at least for training if not complete outsourcing.
HP makes lots of money through EDS selling consulting services and outsourcing services to do all that stuff. Stuff that is being fed by the move to more and more cloud services whether internal or external.
And when I say enterprise services, I mean software as a service stuff like Salesforce. There are more services that business need than Salesforce such as data warehousing that HP is in a strong position to enter or dominate. That said, even though something like Salesforce is a turn key solution hosted off site, it doesn't mean there isn't an enterprise sales process. A middle manager doesn't buy up 1,000 seats of Salesforce subscriptions at $65 per month without going through the normal enterprise approval process. I've seen it and it can take several months even though your average small business owner can sign up in 10 minutes with a corporate credit card. The real deal involves contract scrutiny and due diligence work. And just because Salesforce is easier, it doesn't mean you don't need a ton of development and integration work to bring it in line with your existing practices and software tools which usually requires outside experts at least for training if not complete outsourcing.