One of the benefits of working for HP includes access to high power software executives. This past week I had an opportunity to have lunch with Russ Daniels, the CTO of HP Software. Or more specifically,

Russ Daniels is vice president and chief technology officer of the Strategy and Technology Office within HP’s software business, where he sets and coordinates the technology strategy across HP’s software portfolio of solutions for the Adaptive Enterprise – HP’s vision of an organization in which business and IT are synchronized to capitalize on change.

Russ happens to be my “HP Buddy”. The “HP Buddy Program” is a way for newly acquired Mercury employees to better assimilate to the “HP Way”. Seemingly useful in theory, yet practically hasn’t translated very well. Russ on the other hand, seems to understand very well the gap between theory and practicality. I found him to be smart, very down to early and genuinely interested in driving through technical issues. Our conversation went right into topics such as effectively managing central architecture in a large organizations, approaches to integrate large products and trends in the market. He had a couple funny quotes:

• “Whenever you think you know how big HP is, its twice that size.” — Very funny and very true. I think my HP employee number has more digits then my social security number.
• “The culture of HP is bureaucratic, yet lacks process.”

I’m looking forward to seeing him take a larger role in the new HP Software engineering organization.