Michel Feaster came to HP via Mercury Interactive, where she ran the testing business. Tasked with HP’s automation strategy, she was instrumental in motivating the acquisition of Opsware – a move that gave HP a leadership position in the strongly contested data centre automation business.

She explains why it was so strategic to bring Opsware into HP. “Over the last ten years, the devices in IT have just exploded, so there’s a core value proposition of automation around infrastructure complexity. When you have 100 devices, you can manage them manually. But when you hit a certain threshold, it just doesn’t scale after that. “It’s really about human relationship complexity – organisations are paying way too much money for skilled resources or they physically cannot grow their data centres because there’s not enough people to actually scale. That’s one of the core problems that automation can solve.”