Page 10 - GCN, May 2017

HPE is now solely focused on offering comprehensive and effective software IT management solutions. David
Wray, HPE’s CTO of Federal Alliances, explains why that’s important and how it can help agencies move forward with FITARA.
What is the role of IT in supporting FITARA? It would be hard to take the “IT” out of FITARA. It’s all about how agencies should use IT to gain efficiencies and cost savings in a common framework.
Are agencies making any correctable mistakes in supporting FITARA with IT? Some make
the classic mistake of trying to implement FITARA requirements with old processes. One of the intents of FITARA, though, is to implement modern techniques and approaches. If they try to satisfy FITARA using existing policies, it’s much less
likely to work. You can’t take new technologies and merge them with old processes. You have to apply business process re-engineering, reduce the amount of policy and regulation, and streamline and automate to achieve efficiencies.
What do agencies need to do to really succeed with FITARA? IT must be considered a part of the business
or a strategic enabler of the business. You can’t separate them. The only way to do that is by making the CIO a part of the executive management team, with the power to make funding, allocation and technology decisions. IT must be involved in agency strategy. If you include IT in that conversation, you can start leveraging
IT to achieve mission goals more quickly, more effectively, and at lower cost. When done right, FITARA will help agencies achieve this goal.
HPE has gone through its own share of changes over the past few years. How have those changes positioned HPE to better help federal agencies conquer FITARA? One of the big- gest recent changes is our upcoming spin-merger with Micro Focus. It
is helping us meet our goal of not only being the sixth largest software company, but the largest software IT
times faster than any other data warehouse or database technology, which will also help agencies make better use of predictive analytics. And there are plenty of other acquisitions that put us at the forefront of IT management, including the ability
to better detect and protect against advanced cyberattacks, more easily incorporate predictive flash storage, and move to a software-defined, hyperconverged infrastructure.
Taken together, these capabilities help agencies better track and measure cost and improve operational efficiency.
“Some make the classic mistake of trying to implement FITARA requirements with old processes.”
—David Wray, CTO, Federal Alliances, HPE
management company in the world. As a pureplay software and IT man- agement company, we are committed to being the leading provider of hybrid IT built on a modern, standards-based software-defined infrastructure. It also helps us focus completely on pur- pose-built solutions to help agencies meet FITARA goals.
There are a lot of other changes underfoot at HPE in addition to the Micro Focus spin-merger. How will these change the company, and how will it affect agencies doing business with HPE? We have spent more than $30 billion on acquisitions over the past ten years. For example, we acquired the big data database company Vertica, which we are bundling into our core offerings to greatly improve performance and simplify analytics. That will help our customers run queries up to 1000
How can federal agencies make the most out of cutting-edge technologies, like Internet of Things, the cloud and mobility?
It all starts with going back to basics and getting your house in order. That’s really what FITARA
is designed to do. You can’t move forward with these great technology enablers until you know what you have, eliminate redundancies,
find ways to increase the speed of change, and give IT a seat at the table.
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Q&A: For Feds and HPE, Change is Good