HP ROI: Hundred Million Billion
December 13, 2008
I am confident that the phrase “hundred million billion” is a typographic error. I make them all the time. Have you ever tried to type with webbed feet? Navigate to BMighty.com and take a gander at “How Do You Manage Servers in the Big Leagues: HP Shows One Way” by Lamont Wood here. The article contains some return on investment data, which I find useful. One never knows when an example from an ink company will be needed to add color to a presentation. For me, the interesting data were:
- HP had before rationalization to three data centers “85 official data centers, plus another 400 unofficial locations that were found to harbor servers, totaling about 700 “data marts”
- The way to squeeze down this astounding number of data centers and marts was to use more hardware and virtualization. The payoff was, according to the article, reduce the number of servers by 40 percent and chop energy costs by 60 percent. Sorry, there were no actual numbers in the BMighty.com write up.
- “Hewlett-Packard cut IT spending from 4 percent of revenue three years ago to less than 2 percent today.”
I want to quote the hundred million billion number because you probably doubt that such a number is used by either HP or Mr. Wood. Here is the statement:
With revenues of slightly more than $100 million billion, this should save it an extra couple of billion yearly. But to get to that level they had to undertake a sort of surge, spending 2 percent of one year’s revenue on hardware upgrades.
The hundred million zillion reminds me of Yahoo’s statement that a Web indexing system would cost $300 million. Pulling numbers from outer space is not something this goose does. One fly in the ointment is that Mr. Wood’s data does not match the information here.
Stephen Arnold, December 13, 2008
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