Hewlett-Packard is gearing up for a major campaign to convince
chief information officers with the biggest budgets to buy its
hardware, software and services, instead of IBM's.
With completion of the $13.9bn
EDS acquisition this month, HP believes it has the breadth of
products and services to cater for the most demanding user
requirements.
While its Personal Systems Group (PSG) revenue grew 15% year
over year to $10.3bn, HP is targeting the high-end enterprise,
where it claims it can offer businesses bigger bottom-line savings,
compared with IBM.
Stephen Gill, UK managing director of HP, says, "We have
invested in our sales organisation, and will be targeting the top
5,000 companies that spend the most on IT. HP UK will be looking at
the top 50 businesses."
It is a strategy that can only work once EDS is integrated into
HP. In theory, the combined company will be able to offer CIOs
products and services to transform IT by making it more efficient.
CIOs will have the choice of either buying HP's business technology
optimisation tools it
acquired with Mercury in 2006, or outsourcing IT functions,
which HP claims it can optimise using these same tools.
HP wants businesses to consider its high-end servers for running
traditional mainframe applications. In fact, its Madrid e-business
centre is focused on migrating mainframe Cobol applications to
Java, running on HP servers, says Martin Hess, vice-president for
sales at HP. Hess claims that users can make large savings by
offloading some of the mainframe work.
However, Gartner vice-president Rakesh Kumar is not convinced.
"We are actually seeing more application [workloads] being put on
the mainframe, not less. IBM's zIIP and zAAP processors are
licensed at up to a quarter of the price of traditional mainframe
processors, so the potential savings of moving to PC servers like
those from HP, are less compelling," he says.
One thing is clear: HP is becoming a major software supplier,
and is the fifth largest software company in the world, ahead of
Symantec in terms of revenue, according to the
SoftwareTop100
list.
Roy Illsey, senior research analyst at Butler group, says there
is plenty happening behind the scenes, in places such as HP's
Bristol research labs. "HP is working on cell software, which
enables an IT department to manage virtualised servers more easily.
I believe, when it ships, this technology will represent a turning
point in virtualisation," he says.
Customers and non-customers of HP may soon be getting a call
from the IT supplier. Some experts believe HP does indeed have
compelling software and services products. Certainly, its R&D
is rich in innovative technologies. IT directors need to assess HP,
not just as a supplier of commodity PCs and servers, but as one of
the world's largest software and services companies.