HP Gets It!
Email This Post
HP spent this week realigning their products, and reprioritizing the missions (some would say they are shuffling the chairs on the deck of a sinking ship, but only those a tad more cynical than myself).
In the past week HP was turned the reins of Itanium over to their Intel partner, and abandoned plans for including residual Tru64 technology into HP-UX (opting instead to bundle in tools from Veritas). Both are shrewd moves and to be applauded, regardless of how these undulations fail to reinforce their “Invent” slogan.
Here are some ugly realities about the IT market:
- It is becoming a commodity game and will work on volume.
- Different vendors will specialize on different layers in the stack (chips, boxes, operating systems, middleware, applications — all from different vendors).
- Providing a “whole product” to the market quickly is more important than creating and building it all yourself, and claiming fat margins on low volume (even the IBM mainframe division figured that one out).
Itanium is a sinking ship, and even Intel admits that it will only be viable for high-end servers (and not for long at that given the advances AMD is making with Opteron and IBM is making with Power5). HP-UX will never have escalating sales again given how Linux is eviscerating all UNIX lines. HP has wisely chosen to end their making chips distractions (”let Intel and AMD make them”) and get to market quickly with a “whole product” plan that will stem the bleeding with HP-UX.
HP is looking more like IBM every day, which is good news for HP and bad news for Sun, who still doesn’t quite get it.
