'Companies need to be smarter about technology and not cut investment if they want to survive ' is the message coming from HP. Another quote offered by HP when introducing its newest range of products and services is 'According to McKinsey, 40% of companies in the last recession lost their leading position in the last recession.'

"The CIO is under pressure on the cost side and needs to look at how they manage technology" said Erik Moller, Marketing Director, EMEA, HP Software Information Management Group. "They need to plan for recovery and their competitiveness of the company as a whole."

The latest HP Research Report entitled The Economics of Business Technology, 38% of the respondents believe that the current economic climate is the right time to restructure for the future. At the same just 53% are just cutting costs without restructuring their IT ending up with outdated and inefficient IT solutions. If that weren't bad enough, those who do it well end up spending less than 50% of those who don't.

To be more efficient, Moller believes that CEOs and CIOs accept that they need to identify which projects to save and make some serious decisions. "Businesses need to standardise, optimise and automate their IT processes. At the same time the must prioritise for business value using common tools."

However changing systems costs money and Moller said that in order to improve IT companies need to "look at different flexible sourcing options such as leasing, outsourcing and the use of cloud services." Moller went on, "firms have limited budgets, they need to save costs short term and get long term benefits. This is why we have new offerings."

HP's new offerings cover hardware, software and services. On the storage side HP is introducing two new products, the StorageWorks EVA 6400 and the StorageWorks EVA 8400. Each of these new products will support up to 93% more storage, have virtual RAID 6 support and there will be an additional storage tier based around solid state drives.

Moller claims that these new features will save up to 50% of storage administration costs for customers based on comparison to EMC and NetApp.

The new EVA systems will not just be confined to supporting large enterprise applications. HP is currently running a series of workshops for its own channel on how to integrate EVA, rather than MSA, into blade system environments.

The StorageWorks SAN Virtualisation Services Platform (SVSP) is a new management environment for storage. HP is claiming that it can triple storage utilisation by allowing you to mix multiple types of storage into a single storage platform. One of the goals here is not just to support HP storage but to allow you to incorporate other vendors storage devices. Unfortunately, there is no list of which devices will be supported.

A new version of Data Protector v6.1 is aimed at the problems of backup, recovery and data protection in virtual, physical and hybrid environments. One of the main claims here is the ability to remove the delays caused when using VMware Consolidated Backup. This feature will use ESX Server to do a snapshot of the environment that can then e backed up without stopping the running VM. It will also support the existing EVA snapshot technology which Moller claims "will create a zero downtime backup environment for recovery"

Data Protector 6.1 will also have additional security support to centralise the management of encryption keys from both hardware and software solutions.

Alongside this HP is introducing a multi-tier hybrid service model allowing companies to support different service levels inside the same datacentre. The target for this initially is to support both level 2 and level 4 services which HP believes will deliver cost savings in the range of 15-25%.

To help customers get control of their applications, HP is introducing a new set of EDS Application Management Services. EDS will take over and manage some or all of the customer applications. Moller says "we can show [customers] how we can reduce application maintenance costs by 40%."

Moller is also aware that taking over applications for customers also means being able to deal with data protection and ownership. "With Application Management services we will look at the data to see if we are managing private data and personal data that must be managed according to Data Protection Acts. If so, we will not only follow and adhere to those rules but will deal with any requirements as to where data will be stored."

The final part of this announcement is about financing and leasing services. This is an area where Fujitsu Siemens Computers recently made announcements and now HP's Financing division is also looking to see how they can fund customer IT development. The options here are not just about traditional hardware leasing. HP already has a utility computing model where customers pay for services and hardware based on what they use.

HP is also extending its buy and lease back solutions where HP will purchase customer assets and lease them back. This will help companies take assets off of the balance sheet and provide immediate short term access to capital.

Many IT departments are worrying about budget cuts and how to deliver services for the business. These announcements show that HP not only recognises this but is prepared to do whatever it takes to keep its own business ticking over and help customers expand and renew their IT systems.