I have long complained that the process of creating presentations for products is extremely un-natural, and that in distilling thoughts into a few bullets on a slide, we aren’t able to convey all of the “cool” aspects of the product, why people should be interested, and what the benefits to customers are. I’m not alone, and there are those that claim that PowerPoint is evil (not picking on Microsoft here—equivalent blame is due OpenOffice Impress and like products; they just aren’t as ubiquitous)and will be the death of the human race, or at least human communications, or maybe just you. I’m sure everyone has attended at least one “training” session or briefing in which a slow death by PowerPoint was administered.

A skewering example of this is the brilliant rendering of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in PowerPoint, a speech thought by many to be the most poetic, poignant and perhaps most important political speech ever made by an American president. At the other end of the spectrum is former art school student David Byrne, notable for his participation in the 80s band Talking Heads, who started out to lampoon PowerPoint because of its limitations, but instead embraced it, finding an almost haiku-like freedom in its restrictions.

Back to the videos, since the essence of a product is so often missed in the presentations, with the videos the product managers would be able to talk about their products directly. Tell about all the cool features that they know about and tell customers, but so often get missed when sitting down to create a presentation. So the videos had no scripts, no limiting factors, just reality-TV HP-style. We were told not to prepare anything, just show up and talk. Two cameras and 2 days of studio time.

The point I’m getting to is this: after doing about 4 different videos covering various products, one of the camera operators after the cut asked me, “Aren’t you ever at a loss for words?” That’s it, isn’t it? I can talk at length about the topic and about the products, and I do, all around the world. Some people get tired of me, I’m sure, with my persistent examples and analogies. But finally, I get to shut up. Because you don’t have to listen to me anymore; you don’t have to subscribe to my belief that HP infrastructure software is cool, that it has value, and that it saves customers money.

That’s because world-renowned researcher International Data Corporation has the data about how it saves.

In a just-published report, “Gaining Business Val u e and ROI with HP Insight Control,” IDC writes about the results customers who adopt Insight Control achieved:

A savings of $48,380 per 100 users over 3 years

IDC identified that the savings fell across 4 categories:

• IT staff efficiencies
• IT infrastructure cost savings
• User productivity
• Time savings (allowing IT personnel to focus on value-add initiatives)

The full details and the methodology are in the report. Access it at the link above.