Kfir Godrich, HP’s Head of Innovation sat in on theCube at HP Discover 2012.  He shared some of his insights on the CIO, the market and a look into strategies around cloud, big data, and converged infrastructure. (Full video below.)

Discussing the CIO mindset today, Kfir talks about future strategies and reference to what companies are evaluating today.  Business segmentation is an influence in many companies and CIOs are looking towards utilizing data to ease this transition.  Realignment of whole lines of services is taking hold in the enterprise while the differences encompass hundreds or thousands of business units to somewhere in the tens.  This shift marks a huge challenge and opportunity between IT and the business unit.  At the end of the day, improving costs is among the many challenges being analyzed by reviewing data.  With the right resources in place, such as Big Data and the right infrastructure, this internal run along with optimization is the current challenge.

Among the topics being heard around the cloud revolves around implementing cloud technology.  This certainly sounds like a strategy and infrastructure opportunity and HP is aiming on providing a singular platform to put this on, be it inside, outside the company, or both.  HP itself is walking the walk with a number of initiatives and is taking on these challenges of speed and amount of data in the solutions they provide.  Baked into the solutions are new ways of dealing with structured and unstructured data.  The simple fact is that datacenters are actually increasing and not decreasing.  The demand for compute and storage is growing.  HP’s experience is taking those challenges and delivering with their converged infrastructure and data strategy.

Today cloud security has become a significant element and in some cases a hurdle for organizations that are adopting cloud technologies.  Kfir states that given the state of security versus the interests of the enterprise, that the base security levels should be as secure as possible.  He also feels that if you are serious about implementing these kinds of models, you have to be serious about going to military level encryption.  Kfir states that this is particularly important as cybercrime increases and the skill level of perpetrators increases.   One challenge this brings about is how to balance security concerns and still take care of business at the same time.  With the right framework and Converged Infrastructure, such challenges can be met.  The Converged Infrastructure is a framework at this time, but is filling very rapidly.

Approaching Big Data and having a strategy is something Godrich feels few have a real handle on.  He breaks it down to a couple of steps.  The first level takes a bit of understanding, but more importantly it takes a review of understanding what kind of data the organization has, coming up with what parts they would like to look into, and what outcome would they like to gain from utilizing this data.  HP is busy telling the enterprise about their capabilities with their technologies and is correlating this around Big Data, structured versus unstructured data.  HP is more and more getting into the business of the customer and understanding what they are looking for and that is dependent on content.   Among the biggest questions CIOs are asking from HP today around Big Data are requests in defining how the company can help out with it.  Quite often there is some confusion of algorithms that characterize Big Data with what many people have come to know from search engine algorithms.   The difference of course being that HP maintains the focus of going down into content-level analysis.