Leaving a 2 foot fall of snow and 20 below wind chills in Wisconsin never felt better. Flying into Hamburg, Germany was a tropical paradise by comparison at a balmy 35 degrees. Taking the limo from the airport to the Europäischer Hof hotel was a beautiful half hour tour of the outskirts of the 2^nd largest city in Germany.

HP Software? Is that a complete sentence, or is that a question? Many of you may or may not be aware of the multitude of software products that HP offers the enterprises and general businesses. Outside of the HP icons that litter your new HP OEM computer desktop, advertising HP photo editing and printer drivers, I was not aware of their market saturation.  You will need to think outside the box, and look into software that is connected to virtualization, cloud computing, server management and financial cost control for IT CIO’s. HP software has a huge “cloud” future, their common focus over the next 5 years.

This year, HP chose the exotic City of Hamburg to hold their massive conference.

Location:

The CCH - Congress Centre Hamburg is one of Europe's largest and most modern conference centres, and is ranked among the top venues worldwide for international conferences.

Congress Centre Hamburg (CCH)
Am Dammtor / Marseiller Strasse
20355 Hamburg
Germany

HP has focused on improving their involvement in the blog communities and tech sites, such as ActiveWin.com and Accmanpro.com. They have invited out a select number of those bloggers to their conference under press passes, giving them full access to everything HP software related. They even organized one on one meetings with HP representatives during the entirety of the show.

IvyWorldWide.com, represented by Tom Augenthaler, is a big help to HP for getting involved with the social community. Tom, and his counterpart, Rebecca Taylor from HP, were the team that escorted us bloggers throughout the event.

Day 1:  Registration and Press Forums Day

With more than 3000 attendees including press this year, the conference was full to the brim, but the more than adequate sized conference center made it a very comfortable event. HP catered to us a “press”, giving us earlier access to the pending keynote announcements that happened later in the day.

During the keynote announcement to the press early in the morning, HP had a full deck of presenters on hand to discuss the future of HP enterprise software and networking.

Speakers on hand included:

Steen Lomholt-Thomsen Vice President and General Manager, HP Software and Solutions, Jan Zadak, and Robin Purohit.

 

HP, using their marketing skills, announced their goals for 2010, and with no surprise, the cloud was their focus, while coyly stating it’s not their only focus.

HP sees the need for world transformation. “Cloud Assure” is what their customers would like going forward, according to their research. Going forward, that is what we can expect on the enterprise connectivity.

Without hyping the cloud, HP was sure to not place all their eggs in one basket. They also discussed:

• Value of Partnering with HP

• HP Cloud Assure

• HP Operations Orchestration

• HP Cloud Assure for cost control

• HP Communications as a Service (CaaS).

HP research for the future also shows that CIOs demand elasticity. They acknowledge the challenges such as security, availability, performance and compliance with such a huge focus in the sky.

 

The press briefing was then followed up by a fully blown keynote offering more details to the attendees. This took place in the afternoon, with a well presented stage, and backdrop of 3 screens, opened by a black and white animated comic.

Some of the sponsors that HP recognized are:

The remaining time at the HP convention included vendor booths, available for all to see the latest software offerings. Employees of HP (and other vendors) were at booths offering live demonstrations of their software applications, cloud services, and networking solutions to those in attendance.

 

Included in the cost of the convention was an extravagant party, which was thrown on Thursday night. Offering a taste of the harbors in Hamburg, the event was done in great taste, and had top notch entertainment. From a Jazz ensemble to a popular Beatles cover band, called the Re-Beatles, they spared no expense to keep their current and future clients happy and entertained.

The convention was a virtual success, no pun intended. HP has spread their wings, embraced what appears to be our future in cloud computing, and at the same time, reached out to it’s customers and fans in the blogoshpere showing that they are determined to present solutions to the enterprise consumers that will benefit everyone.