Frank van Rees, MD and Enterprise Business Lead at HP SA, says HP can help government transform their IT to deliver services to citizens - instantly.

Fank van Rees took up the position of MD and Enterprise Business Lead at HP South Africa in January 2010. A Dutch native, Van Rees brought a wealth of expertise in sales, marketing and services, as well as international best practices, to the South African subsidiary of the IT giant.

Van Rees points out that to many people HP is still the printer company. However, the $40 billion it spent on acquisitions and R&D in the last five years have made it the largest IT company in the world, able to offer end-to-end enterprise-level IT services and solutions. “HP earns $126 billion in revenue a year, has around 325 000 employees and operates in 170 countries,” he says. It also has some 145 000 partners across the globe.

“With HP’s major acquisition in 2002 – of Compaq, it became number one in hardware. A few years later, we acquired 10 software companies, and are now the seventh largest software company in the world.

The majority of R&D spend is in software development. “HP is number one in IT management software, which is key,” he says. “HP wants to be a key player in the data centre space and IT management software is important in that.”

HP acquired Electronic Data Systems (EDS) three years ago, and merged it with HP’s outsourcing division to enhance our services offering, Van Rees comments. This acquisition was worth some $13.9 billion and involved the integration of two giant enterprises – HP had 160 000 and EDS had 170 000 people at the time.

HP integrated one of its newer acquisitions, 3Com, in July 2010, and with that is set to challenge Cisco for its networking throne. Says Van Rees: “The networking market has been dominated by one player for years. We were number two with ProCurve. Now, with 3Com, we can offer a whole new stack.”

Van Rees believes that in a world that’s becoming increasingly mobile and connected, expectations that citizens have from government and customers have from businesses are changing. “Government departments and many businesses still operate very much in silos – they don’t have an integrated approach to IT yet and are not able to deliver services their customers want instantly,” he says. “We believe that we can help the government close that expectation gap and transform their IT to enhance service delivery. And even further - IT can grow the economy.”

A lot of services and applications will operate in the cloud, Van Rees predicts. “Cloud computing is a key development area for the future, and not just for vendors like HP. It could enable government to deliver the same level of service in major metropolitan areas and in the deepest rural South Africa.”