"Arbitraging labor" -- or reducing labor costs -- is an advantage, he said, the long-term opportunities for companies will come through IT automation. - HP CEO Mark Hurd said. Hurd also said HP will continue to deliver tools that help users reduce hands-on labor costs and human error. "Instead of having a lot of humans" running data centers, he said, users will "want a 7-by-24, lights-out environment that is monitored, run and controlled remotely." Ann Livermore, executive vice president of HP's Technology Solutions Group, was more specific about what IT shops can achieve through virtualization and automation. She said that with these technologies, instead of having one technician for every 20 servers, companies can have one technician for every 200 servers.

During a Symposium ITxpo Q&A with Gartner analysts Carl Claunch and Leslie Fiering (video clip), he said CIOs won't be satisfied until their IT budget goes down to zero. Secondly, he said that only companies with R&D can deliver another zero---a humanless data center. With long-term investments in servers, storage and management, Hurd is aiming HP at automating IT, taking the cost (much of it human) out and become the premier utility computing company. "At its core, HP has the best technologists on the planet Earth," Hurd said. HP research is "focusing on trends, such as how far to push virtualization so you get true utility computing, how to push the management thesis farther, operatorless data centers and digital media centers that change the way media is pumped into the home," he added.

Source: 1, 2Prashanth RaiTag(s):Offshoring, HP