Civil service chief endorses 'government as platform' digital strategy

The head of the civil service, Jeremy Heywood, has endorsed the government digital strategy, hailing the move to “government as a platform” as a key part of Whitehall reform.

Writing in a blog post, Heywood said the pace of digital change in the civil service is accelerating.

“Things are changing in the civil service. The changes might be hard to see from outside – you won’t have heard about them on the news – but they are happening,” he said.

“Technology and the internet in particular, are the driving forces. Many in the world of business understood this and adapted to it years ago. The civil service lagged behind. Now we are changing that.”

Heywood discussed a number of elements of the government digital strategy, such as the Gov.UK web publishing platform and work to digitise 25 high-volume government transactions.

He revealed that HP CEO Meg Whitman and her team met with some of Whitehall’s digital leaders and permanent secretaries last week. HP remains the biggest IT supplier to the UK government by revenue, earning about £1.7bn per year – but moves to end big outsourcing deals and bring in smaller and more agile suppliers have threatened HP's dominance.  

“The discussion indicated just how significant this agenda is and also – in my view – the good progress we have already made,” said Heywood.

Heywood said the move to “government as a platform” was intended to change Whitehall from “a series of disjointed silos” to “a more unified, efficient service” – echoing closely the words of government digital chief Mike Bracken. In a recent interview with Computer Weekly, Bracken described the move from silos to platforms as a “generational” switch: “That is going to be the bulk of the activity technically in the next parliament,” he said.

Heywood acknowledged the role of the Government Digital Service (GDS), which Bracken leads, and said the digital principles GDS has established need to be applied to policy making, and not just to technology.

“I believe that, thanks to the excellent work of the Government Digital Service and the increasing digital capability within each individual department, the British civil service is already at the cutting edge of applying digital technology to public service delivery. But we now need to take this to the next level, and apply the same principles and techniques in policy design,” he said.

“A huge amount of work has been done already, but we have just scratched the surface of what’s possible. New services will emerge – bespoke, personalised services government couldn’t normally justify spending money on, especially in a tight budgetary environment or services no-one else has even thought of before.”

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Service model driving cyber crime, says Europol report

The cyber crime support industry is becoming increasingly commercialised, according to a report published by Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre.

Specialists in the virtual underground economy are developing products and services for use by other cyber criminals, the Internet Organised Crime Threat Assessment (IOCTA) report said.

The report’s authors believe this crime-as-a-service business model drives innovation and sophistication, and provides access to a wide range of services that facilitate almost any type of cyber crime.

As a result, the barriers to entry for cyber crime are being lowered to allow those lacking technical expertise - including traditional organised crime groups - to conduct cyber crime.

The report also highlights the abuse of legitimate services and tools such as anonymisation, encryption and virtual currencies, and the abuse of “darknets” for illicit online trade in drugs, weapons, stolen goods, stolen personal and payment card data, forged identity documents and child abuse material.

This hidden internet has become a principal driving force in the evolution of cyber crime and represents a highly complex challenge for law enforcement, the report said.

Criminals are also reducing their risk by operating from jurisdictions outside of the EU, which have outdated legal tools and insufficient response capacities.

"The inherently transnational nature of cyber crime, with its growing commercialisation and sophistication of attack capabilities, is the main trend identified in the IOCTA,” said Rob Wainwright, director or Europol.

“It means issues concerning attribution, the abuse of legitimate services, and inadequate or inconsistent legislation are among the most important challenges facing law enforcement today," he said.

EU home affairs commissioner Cecilia Malmström said the fact that almost anyone can become a cyber criminal is putting ever-increasing pressure on law enforcement authorities.

“We need to use our new knowledge of how organised crime operates online to launch more transnational operations," she said.

Raising awarenessBuilding capacityStandardising practices and proceduresIncreasing international and cross-border cooperationExchanging information and intelligenceDeveloping adequate and harmonised legislationDismantling and disrupting criminal infrastructures behind illicit online services

“We need to ensure that investigations into payment card fraud and online child abuse do not stop at national borders."

The 2014 IOCTA report includes a set of recommendations for law enforcement to address the evolving and trans-national nature of cybercrime in a diverse and flexible manner.

The report will contribute towards the setting of EU priorities for 2015 in tackling cyber attacks, online sexual exploitation and payment fraud as part of serious organised crime.

One of the report’s co-authors, Alan Woodward of the University of Surrey, said that, because modern cybercrime is trans-national by nature, it is vital to take an international view of the threat it poses.

“Europol’s Cybercrime Centre is able to provide a unique perspective on this threat as it has access to data from law enforcement agencies across Europe.

“It should be seen as a vital piece of work that should be read by all policy makers and decision makers involved in combating cybercrime,” he said.

Woodward said that, if agencies fail to mobilise to meet the threats highlighted in the report, organised cybercrime will gain the upper hand.

“However, if agencies work together across borders, then we can use modern technologies to catch criminals, rather giving them a platform for ever more innovative forms of crime,” he said.

The Europol Cybercrime Centre hosts the recently-launched international cyber crime taskforce, which includes the UK as a founding member.

The Joint Cybercrime Action Taskforce (J-CAT), which is currently in a six-month pilot, will co-ordinate international investigations with partners targeting key cyber crime threats.

These include underground forums and malware, such as banking Trojans, that have targeted financial sector institutions in Europe, US and elsewhere. 

The J-CAT is led by Andy Archibald, deputy director of the National Cyber Crime Unit (NCCU) from the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA).

The taskforce is made up of cyber liaison officers from EU states, non-EU law enforcement partners and the European Cybercrime Centre, and will operate from offices in Europol’s headquarters.

Austria, Canada, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, the UK and the US are part of the J-CAT. Australia and Colombia have also committed to the initiative.

J-CAT is the first permanent, multilateral cyber crime taskforce established in Europe to co-ordinate investigations against top cyber-criminal networks.

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Nationwide roll-out of Universal Credit to start in early 2015

The government is to roll-out a limited version of its controversial Universal Credit welfare reform nationwide, starting in February 2015.

The plan is a dramatic acceleration for availability of the new benefit scheme, which as recently as May had slowed to its lowest adoption rate since soon after it was first launched in April 2013.

The nationwide roll-out will only cover new claims from single jobseekers – the simplest of benefit types – which so far has been offered in just 50 jobcentres, with a further expansion to nearly 100 due by Christmas. There are about 700 jobcentres in the UK, and the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) said that new claims to legacy (non-Universal Credit) benefits will be stopped nationally for single people by 2016.

Work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith also announced that the previous project chief, Howard Shiplee, was standing down as director general for Universal Credit, to be replaced as senior responsible owner by Neil Couling, the DWP executive in charge of jobcentres.

Shiplee has been suffering from ill health for some time, and has not been able to work full-time on the project since the start of the year. He is now taking on a “non-executive and advisory role” on the programme. Couling will be the seventh leader of the Universal Credit project since its inception in 2012. 

The accelerated roll-out will be using the much-criticised IT system developed for the initial Pathfinder pilot phase of Universal Credit. Some £40m of work on the IT system had to be thrown away after problems in its early stages, and a further £90m will be written off before Universal Credit is fully rolled out to all benefit claimants, due to take place by 2018.

A new digital system is currently being developed by DWP, which will be used to underpin the full roll-out. Testing of this system, designed to cater for all types of benefits, is due to start later this year.

“We are going to accelerate the delivery of Universal Credit from the new year, bringing forward the national rollout through 2015/16 to every single community across Great Britain. Universal Credit is going nationwide. I promise you we are going to finish what we started,” said Duncan Smith.

So far, 26,000 people have applied for Universal Credit – mostly single people, the simplest type of claimant to process. More complex claims, such as couples and families, are being trialled in a limited number of jobcentres.

A National Audit Office report in September last year revealed a catalogue of failures in leadership and project management on Universal Credit, and a culture of secrecy and ignoring warnings within the DWP. Duncan Smith has since repeatedly insisted that the department has learned its lessons from those original problems and that the project is back on track.

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CIO interview: Darrell Sturley, deputy CIO, University of Oxford

The University of Oxford comprises 38 individual colleges, each full of students and staff with the need to communicate across campuses, and sometimes even across countries.

The university recently announced it will adopt new communications systems to increase the use of bring your own device (BYOD) and collaboration across the educational institution.

Darrell Sturley, deputy CIO at the university, says the project will replace Oxford University’s current systems with managed services. 

The university has invested in several new administrative systems over the past five years and, with those investments behind it, now aims to steer focus towards building a new IT infrastructure that reflects the institution’s academic needs.

“This integrated communications project is part of the overall initiative to give our admin staff, researchers, teachers and students more modern ways to communicate,” he says. 

The telephone system currently in place at the university is almost 30 years old. Although it still works, the technology does not deliver the functionality that the current generation of students need, and some of the technology has reached end of support. 

Rather than replacing the phone system with a new one, the university chose to explore what else was available. It decided to look beyond telephony and consider what else people might find useful, says Sturley.

The university chose OpenScape Voice and OpenScape UC from Unify to provide students with the ability to call from a PC, audio conference, use headsets and instant message to increase collaboration across campuses. This allows them to communicate with staff and other students at no cost over Wi-Fi.

“Until the spring, the story was us knowing we needed to do something different and finding out what that different thing was. Having chosen to work with Unify, we’re now building the equipment,” says Sturley.

The IT team will pilot the system from February 2015, starting with around 250 staff and students, to understand any human, cultural or process issues that may occur during use, rather than just focusing on the technology problems that may arise.

Sturley points out that, as with any IT project, one of the biggest issues will be user acceptance. He says although many will easily adopt the new technology, there are always individuals who struggle with technological change.

“For some people, it will be very natural, as they probably use something like this at home. But for others, it will be quite a departure. It might take those who are used to having a physical phone on their desk a while to get used to this sort of system,” he says.

By the end of the project in 2017, all university staff and students will be integrated into the system. With 28,000 phone lines and approximately 40,000 staff and students, the length of the project is important in ensuring the least disruption possible when implementing and rolling out the new system.

“We could just turn it on and say to everybody, ‘right, there you are guys, get started’, but we felt that was not likely to generate the most benefit and that proper preparation and proper readiness was the way to do this,” he says.

Sturley points out that the need for collaboration and communication has increased, as has the number of devices each student uses. Students will not only have a laptop, but may also have a phone and a tablet device.

The university has ensured the new system will support the main smartphone operating systems – Android, iOS and Windows Phone.

We're very mindful that students require a modern working environment

Darrell Sturley, University of Oxford

“We’re very mindful that students require a modern working environment,” says Sturley. “It is student-led to a certain extent, as they turn up with all kinds of gadgets and devices. This system will allow students to make use of a range of those.”

Oxford University is a collegiate university made up of several buildings, colleges and campuses, and also has a unique teaching system based around personal tutorials.

This dynamic makes communication extremely important, and although the university is very traditional, it is still technologically advanced.

“As well as the tradition and the architectural heritage, we think it’s important that students and staff have access to modern IT systems, and that working here is a 21st century experience,” says Sturley. 

“This kind of system can bring us all closer together – it can tie the colleges of Oxford University together as one community.”

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The digital CIO: Motivate the elephant

One of the permanent features of CIOs' and other IT leaders’ lives is change – how to implement, manage and deliver it.

In my experience, there is a deeply held prejudice among senior business leaders that IT departments block change.

The truth, I feel, is quite otherwise. IT people consider change to be an integral aspect of working with technology. It’s something they actually love and are comfortable with.

What they are less comfortable with is implementing change in a disorderly way, sorting through messy emotional issues, dealing with conflicting and often seemingly illogical beliefs held by business leaders, stakeholders, suppliers, customers and even their own people.

Sadly, that’s what the real world is like. Which is why, as a coach, I find it useful to have a model for change that is more sophisticated than just "make a better business case".

Graduating from Trinity College Cambridge with a degree in English, James Caplin (pictured) wrote professionally for two decades, specialising in corporate videos. 

In 2002 he discovered coaching and, with his wife, moved into a house in a run-down area of West London, which prompted him to become a community activist. 

Now head of coaching at CIO Development, Caplin leads workshops on communication and transformation. 

He serves on several company and charitable boards, and in 2012 was awarded a British Empire Medal for services to his area, now known as Notting Hill.

I have found the model described in Chip and Dan Heath’s book Switch is highly effective for IT leaders. It is particularly appropriate for driving change where you do not have the direct power to mandate it or the resources to pay for it.

That is the business reality for IT professionals. The IT leader may have a budget to implement change, but that won’t buy the co-operation of everyone affected by the proposed change. The CIO can set the course for their own department, but that won’t ensure everyone co-operates.

Imagine your organisation is an elephant – large, unwieldy and easily spooked. 

Your job, as the person driving this change, is to get the elephant – and its rider (the guy sitting on the elephant) – moving in the direction you want it to go.

This image is, for many IT leaders, familiar. They are constantly urging clients, bosses, stakeholders, colleagues, reports, suppliers, users and others to do things – and constantly encountering resistance.

Many IT leaders I work with have an engineering or a similar scientific background – or, at least, a scientific approach. They believe in logic. They also seem to have a deep-seated (and quite touching) belief that logic can change minds.

As historians and lawyers know, people don’t work that way. Belief is deeper than logic. Logic is just an effective and flexible tool. To change minds, to motivate people, you have to work at the belief level.

The example that follows might help illustrate how this works in practice. I recently coached an IT leader who was tasked with leading the roll-out of SAP across multiple European business units.

In its relatively early stages, the project hit a typical real-world problem. The IT leader planned to bring an in-house expert from one country – let’s call it Boduria – who had successfully led the implementation there, to work with a neighbouring country – let’s call it Syldavia – on the implementation.

Unfortunately, the Bodurian business leaders were firmly against the plan. Bodurians had never liked Syldavians. To make matters worse, a Bodurian IT consultant had promised them the earth in an earlier project – and then spectacularly failed to deliver.

My client had tried to convince the Bodurian leaders with logic, but that had not shifted the situation. He had considered rolling over and simply agreeing with the Bodurians, but he knew in his heart of hearts that the project was going to be much more difficult without the expert. He felt stuck.

How could he motivate the elephant? I took the IT leader through the three key principles of the "motivating the elephant" thought process – find the feeling, shrink the change, grow your people – asking a series of focused questions:

Find the feeling

Q. What might change the feelings of the Bodurian leadership?

The IT leader quickly came up with a number of suggestions:

Organise a workshop led by the Syldavian expert as she was very persuasive in person.Invite the Bodurian business leadership to get involved in designing the way the Syldavian expert was introduced.Invite her to work for a day a week initially, win the Bodurian IT department’s trust, then increase that to a couple of days a week and – only after that, if by that time the Bodurian business more widely felt comfortable with her – would she start working permanently in Boduria.

Shrink the change

Q. What is the smallest next practical step you could take to move the project forward ?

It would be useful to invite Bodurian leaders to visit Syldavia, meet the business’s leaders there, and hear from trusted third parties how effective this expert was and how easy to work with.

Q. Who should be invited ?

It would pay to get a group of influencers over, not just the leadership.

We delved into this until the IT leader had what he felt was a satisfactory list of people to attend the workshop.

Grow your people

Q. How might the experience of driving this change become part of people's learning?

Since the Bodurian business leaders wanted their own people to become IT experts, the IT leader realised that he could suggest to them that the Syldavian expert might mentor one of their staff, assisting them with that agenda.

We explored this a little further: Who would nominate the person to be mentored? How would the Syldavian expert be involved in this aspect of their work? How would it be supervised?

This exercise helped the IT leader get unstuck. As it turned out, he used all the ideas he had come up with, and the expert was rapidly accepted by the Bodurians.

That, in a nutshell, is why this model, and coaching itself, can be so powerful. It’s inevitable that we all approach the world in the way we are familiar with.

Working with the right coach – which means someone who understands the field you are operating in, is skilled with useful mental models and with whom you click – enables us all to see our familiar worlds from new perspectives, and so generate new ways of functioning.

This enables us and the businesses we lead to benefit from fresh and improved results.

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Can Lenovo turn around IBM's x86 business and win in the enterprise?

Lenovo has stated it will turn its acquisition of IBM’s x86 server business into a $5bn profitable business within 12 months.

Through the $2.1bn deal – expected to be closed on 1 October 2014 – the Chinese PC giant will take over the global team of the IBM x86 server business, which will be organised under Lenovo’s Enterprise Business Group.

Former IBM server chief Adalio Sanchez – who led the x86 server business at IBM – will become senior vice-president of enterprise systems, reporting to Gerry Smith, Lenovo’s president for the North America region.

Lenovo has big plans for the enterprise market, according to Smith.

"Over time, we will compete vigorously across every sector, using our manufacturing scale and operational excellence to repeat the success we have had with PCs," he said.

Among the areas the company will need to address is the decline in IBM’s x86 server revenue, as a result of its competitors aggressively targeting customers since the deal was announced in January.

As Computer Weekly previously reported, Gartner's figures for the second quarter of 2014 show HP achieved 7.3% year-on-year growth to achieve a 34.7% server revenue share for the three-month period. Meanwhile, IBM saw its server revenue shrink by 14.9% for the same quarter.

The company will also need to address the range of enterprise services it offers to customers globally. 

While it has 17 four-hour response centres in the UK, there are only three across the whole of the southern hemisphere, and none in Africa or India. This could be a risk to global businesses that require fast turnaround on their Lenovo servers in these regions.

Commenting on the limited geographic spread of four-hour support contracts, Smith said: "IBM’s services team is the best in the business. Customers will be able to leverage the IBM support structure. The same service they get today, they will get around the globe."

Another issue for datacentre managers is long-term server support contracts, which is far from clear. 

While it is possible to buy five years of extended warranties on rival HP ProLiant and Dell PowerEdge x86 server families, head of server and storage at Lenovo UK Tom Goodwin said at a recent briefing: "We will support existing Lenovo ThinkServer and xServers for 18 months." 

Clearly this is a gap Lenovo will need to address if it wishes to be successful in the enterprise, where servers may have a lifespan of three years or more.

The general consensus among analysts is Lenovo will repeat the success it had with the 2005 acquisition of the IBM PC business and aggressively grow its marketshare. However, it may be challenged in selling the technical merits of more expensive commodity servers from the IBM x86 server portfolio.

In the Enterprise Workloads on The IBM X6 Portfolio report published earlier this year, IDC analyst Jed Scaramella noted the IBM x86 server platform falls in the higher end of the x86 systems market, which has been traditionally dominated by lower-cost servers. 

"Some customers still perceive a price premium with four-socket servers, where much of the rationale on x86 server procurement still centres on capital expenditure," he said. 

"IBM will have to demonstrate the operational efficiencies and business benefits that a higher-end x86 system can deliver versus a low-cost volume server."

With Lenovo taking over this product range, it will have to prove these products still justify a premium over its own ThinkServer family.

For competitors such as Dell and HP, this deal could mean stronger competition in SME environments

Giorgio Nebuloni, IDC

With IBM’s team of System x engineers, developers and support personnel moving to Lenovo, analyst TBR said in April that the team – combined with efficiencies and scale – would enable the business to quickly become a credible and competitive force in the datacentre. 

"The success of a similar transition between IBM and Lenovo in 2005 suggests the two suppliers will once again drive synergies for the 2014 x86 server transition, resulting in improved acquisition costs, on-going product quality and strong services and support that come together to create increased value for customers," the analyst noted.

Yet its success will depend on how quickly Lenovo is able to win business outside the core Chinese market.

The company will also be taking over IBM’s Flex and x86-based PureFlex integrated systems. Further, it will resell IBM’s entry and mid-range Storwize storage product family, Linear Tape Open (LTO) products, IBM Flash storage arrays and elements of IBM’s system software portfolio, including SmartCloud, General Parallel File System and Platform Computing system.

All of this points to high-end, enterprise computing, with potentially high price tags. This is unless Lenovo can somehow change the dynamics of the enterprise server market dramatically and sell cheap enterprise-class computing.

Arguably, it is in the small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) market which offers the most potential for Lenovo, and most closely fits with the success it has had with ThinkPad laptops, when it acquired the IBM PC business. 

In an article covering the announcement of the IBM x86 server acquisition, Europe research manager for servers at IDC Giorgio Nebuloni noted: "For competitors such as Dell and HP, this deal could mean stronger competition in SME environments, where IBM had been less aggressive in the past, especially given that Lenovo has experience in building and growing an acquired business in the form of IBM's PC business."

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ARM enters mainstream datacentre with HP’s ProLiant Moonshot servers

Low-powered ARM-based products have entered the mainstream enterprise datacentre with server maker HP launching two production-ready ARM-powered servers in its ProLiant Moonshot portfolio.

The first is Moonshot 64-bit server, HP ProLiant m400, based on the AppliedMicro X-Gene SoC (system on a chip) with Linux (Ubuntu) operating system. It is designed to deliver two times the density and four times more web-serving compute and 30% reduction in total cost of ownership compared to Intel’s Xeon-based servers.

The second ARM-based server from HP is the m800 Moonshot server designed for real-time data processing of high volume, complex data, such as fraud detection and purchase pattern analysis. The 32-bit ARM server has Texas Instrument KeyStone-based SOC. It features ARM’s A15 cores and integrated Rapid I/O (input/output) to deliver three times more bandwidth and 90% low latency data throughput.

“ARM has become ready for enterprise datacentres,” said Olivier Frank, HP Moonshot director for Europe. “Customers have been asking HP for a low-power server option and so we have expanded our Moonshot portfolio with ARM-based servers.”

For specific workloads, the ARM architecture optimises a customer’s most critical compute requirement – balanced memory at a lower total cost of ownership.

The new HP Moonshot ARM-based systems will deliver hyperscale, datacentre environments to help customers improve application performance, drive business innovation and deliver breakthrough datacentre economics, according to the server maker.

Frank said the company is investing in ARM technologies for designing production-ready datacentre offerings because it hopes that, in two to three years, ARM will hold between 20 to 30% of the server industry based on industry analyst forecasts.

“It is important to provide a choice so there is no monopolistic market,” he said. “We cannot ignore the growth of ARM-based, end-point devices, which has direct consequences on the datacentre side. ARM architecture is valuable in terms of density and power-efficiency.”

HP’s ARM architecture-based Moonshot servers come just days after the company's server rival Dell said it too is considering working with the Cambridge-based energy-efficient chipmaker. Michael Dell, founder of Dell, told delegates at its Solutions Summit earlier this month that the company may work with Cambridge-based microprocessor firm ARM for its mainstream servers.

Dell said: “If ARM works, really works, and costs less, we will use ARM. As it moves to 64-bit architecture, it becomes more interesting.”

At the Open Compute Summit in San Jose, California, ARM launched a baseline standard for 64-bit servers, which it hoped will help it encroach on Intel’s traditional territory, powering commodity hardware in the datacentre.

The standard also has the backing of the Linaro Enterprise Group, a consortium of companies supporting the development of open-source software for the ARM architecture, including Facebook and Samsung. 

HP, which has a long-standing partnership with high-power, high-throughput x86 provider Intel, has previously released both Intel and AMD-based Moonshot servers. Intel’s low-power offering laptop chip Atom has been used to power the HP low-powered Moonshot server. It is an x86-compatible design, which means it should be capable of running 32-bit server software.  

But chipmaker ARM’s work with AMD to deliver SoC processors designed for a new generation of servers and to tackle the biggest problem facing today's datacentres – power and cooling – is making ARM a viable alternative to Intel chips. 

Frank said that, as more and more end-point devices such as smartphones and tablets are powered by ARM, it is important to have back-end server hardware based on similar energy-efficient system-on-a-chip SoC technology for maximum efficiencies.

By leveraging energy-efficient system-on-a-chip SoC technology, a dense, converged form-factor and highly flexible fabrics, HP Moonshot can provide high-speed connectivity between cartridges, as well as balanced computing with maximum throughput and memory to improve performance and efficiency, said Frank. 

“ARM technologies will change the dynamics of how enterprises build IT solutions to quickly address customer challenges,” said Antonio Neri, senior vice president and general manager, Servers and Networking, HP. 

HP is targeting specific workloads such as web caching and has been beta-testing the low-powered Moonshot servers with several users including PayPal and ARM itself. 

“We are working with our partner ARM as our end-user testing the new Moonshot servers for its manageability, scalability and portability,” said Frank

PayPal is another customer using the HP ProLiant m800 in its Systems Intelligence project. “Paypal does real-time data analytics, high-performance computing and web caching – all apt use cases for low-powered servers, Frank said. 

“The HP ProLiant m800’s combination of ARM and Multicore Digital Signal Processors [DSP] with high-speed, low-latency networking and tiered memory management creates a very energy-efficient, extremely capable parallel processing platform with a familiar Linux interface,” said Ryan Quick, principal architect, Advanced Technology Group, PayPal.  

“It’s a truly new approach to bringing scale-out design 'inside the box', and breaks barriers between high performance computing and enterprise technology.”

The extension of Moonshot portfolio with ARM architecture addresses IT demands with a vast pool of processing resources that can be located anywhere, scaled to any workload and available at any time, according to HP.

As power usage of datacentre products is increasingly becoming a priority for enterprises, micro-servers could become more than a device to fill the gap between PCs and servers, experts said.

“Intel shouldn’t be complacent because competitive architecture is very credible and giants such as Google will experiment with the alternative architectures powered by ARM,” according to Gartner analyst Errol Rasit.  

The new Moonshot servers are available immediately and pricing will vary based on model and customer configurations.

HP is also extending the reach of the growing ARM ecosystem.  The HP ProLiant Moonshot ARM-64 Developer Program, part of the HP AllianceOne program, will enable developers to test and port code stacks and solutions to the ARM architecture. Through this programme, developers can design fully-featured software on an ARM 64-bit system by remotely accessing the Moonshot discovery lab.  

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