news In an announcement yesterday, HP revealed that diversified local company Elders had signed it for a seven-year infrastructure and applications services agreement. Elders is a 172-year-old company incorporating the Elders rural services businesses and the automotive and forestry operations acquired and developed by Futuris Corporation.
According to the agreement, Elders will utilise cloud technology to deploy its enterprise technology refresh program – Project Connect. HP Enterprise Cloud Services will provide Elders with secure processing capacity and real-time data access that will enable the company to respond quickly to the changing business conditions intrinsic to agribusiness. This will help Elders to drive innovation by getting new services and products faster to the market, avoiding the typical protracted capital acquisition and systems deployment processes.
Shaun Hughes, Chief Information Officer, Elders Australia stated that outsourcing to HP was an integral part of the company’s transformation program. “HP’s cloud will provide us with a robust infrastructure and service delivery model that enables us to scale up for each of our program releases, and the applications methodologies and tools HP brings to the table enable us to de-risk the legacy development components of our build,” Hughes said.
In October, HP had announced new solutions and services based on HP Converged Infrastructure that would help businesses and service providers to efficiently deliver cloud services and to minimise risk, lower costs and leverage existing investments.
As part of a phased four-year program, Elders can utilise a combination of existing technology along with automated processes and procedures for application and infrastructure management and security. HP will also offer its full range of Technology Outsourcing services to modernise and refresh the technology environment. HP Data Centre Services, according to the vendor, will help to guarantee high accessibility to IT services and uninterrupted reliable operations. HP also will deliver Network Management Services to remotely manage and monitor Elders’ 540 distributed networks across Australia.
Additionally, HP will provide a set of Security Services, offering comprehensive security oversight of the managed environment in accordance with Elders’ security standards and policies. To plan for a cloud environment, HP will use HP Storage, ESL E-series Tape Libraries and HP BladeSystem servers to refresh Elders’ hardware.
HP will synchronise Elders’ technology infrastructure with the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) Version 3 service management framework using products from its HP Software suite.
HP will also supply Workplace Services for all of Elders’ computing devices, including printers, handheld devices and desktop and notebook PCs. All of these infrastructure and applications services will be provided from HP global delivery centres in Australia and the Philippines, minimising risk for clients like Elders while offering them greater flexibility and cost efficiency.
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