HP Takes Data Management to New Heights

Company’s enterprise data warehouse surpasses milestones in users, queries and system size

PALO ALTO, Calif., HP announced it has achieved significant milestones in its enterprise data warehouse, making it the largest of its kind in the world and one that serves as an example of the business intelligence possible with today’s technology.

More than 35,000 HP employees are currently using the enterprise data warehouse, an electronic repository that enables users to load, store, retrieve, analyze and manage company information. The system, an implementation of the company’s HP Neoview commercial offering, executes more than 300,000 quarterly business queries with the capability to more than triple in usage.

Consolidating numerous data marts into a single enterprise data warehouse was one of the initiatives that HP identified in 2005 as part of its efforts to transform the company’s IT organization. Since then, HP has more than halved its IT operating costs. Altogether, HP has retired more than 700 data marts, leading to a 70 percent reduction in operating expenses in its business-intelligence operations.

HP’s internal enterprise data warehouse initiative demonstrates how customers can create a more simple and dependable IT structure. HP Neoview is now running in dozens of companies that represent more than $1 trillion in revenue. These customers are able to use HP Neoview’s business intelligence to analyze massive amounts of information in seconds to make better business decisions.

“One of our missions is to provide good, timely information to users so they can make more-informed business decisions,” said Randy Mott, HP executive vice president and chief information officer. “We’ve implemented and are growing what we know to be the first true enterprise data warehouse anywhere in the world, where all company information is available.”

HP’s enterprise data warehouse is built on HP’s flagship data warehousing product, HP Neoview. Based on proven NonStop technology, HP Neoview provides an integrated environment for utilizing data across an enterprise.

Users can perform various kinds of analysis appropriate for their business. For example, Neoview helps retailers understand their customers’ buying patterns or the effectiveness of their merchandise assortment. It also helps manufacturers organize data so they can calculate their costs and gross margins uniformly across different regions.

Now running on standards-based technology, HP Neoview scales easily and can be re-provisioned as new technology arrives, helping customers reduce risk and lower their total cost of ownership.

To fully realize the benefits of its enterprise data warehouse transformation, HP invested in core fundamentals, including programs on information governance, information quality and master data management, to create an integrated enterprise data management environment.

HP’s master data management strategy created common definitions for key business entities such as customer, product and location. This provided an enterprise view across business units of complex information relationships that existed across HP. HP IT teamed with business stakeholders across the organization to focus on data timeliness, consistency and quality, and to develop an ongoing plan for information governance.

The governance model effectively positions HP to manage business, technology, reporting and analytic resources in response to rapidly changing market demands. These initiatives laid the foundation for ongoing benefits provided by the enterprise data warehouse platform and HP’s approach to managing information as a corporate asset.

The HP enterprise data warehouse boasts 384 two-way Intel® Itanium® servers (768 RX262X processors), each with 12 gigabytes of memory. Total storage exceeds one petabyte.(1)

HP’s initiative to transform its data warehousing environment is part of a broader investment it is making in business intelligence, including world-class expertise. Through its central research arm, HP Labs, HP is transforming business intelligence from batch reporting for enterprise back offices to pervasive, interactive services that are delivered into online business processes. This enables an enterprise data warehouse to handle both simple and complex queries with faster response times.

“Business intelligence is a key priority for us and we’re sharing with customers our success at getting good, actionable information for better decision making,” said Thomas E. Hogan, senior vice president, Software and Solutions, HP. “HP Neoview has played a key role in HP’s IT transformation, and many customers I talk to have the same challenges we had in terms of the need for real-time access to accurate information.”

About HP

HP, the world’s largest technology company, simplifies the technology experience for consumers and businesses with a portfolio that spans printing, personal computing, software, services and IT infrastructure. More information about HP (NYSE: HPQ) is available at http://www.hp.com.

(1) 1 petabyte equals 1,000 terabytes or 1,0005 bytes.