February 13th, 2007
Is HP an IT services company?
I popped into HP's launch of its latest HP-UX operating system and new servers Tuesday evening. It was held at 111 Minna Art Gallery in San Francisco rather than Palo Alto, where HP usually does such things.
I would rather HP had held the launch in Palo Alto because then I wouldn't have gone to it. It was a deadly dull affair but I did get a chance to catch up with some of my colleagues, Don Clark, Dan Farber, Tom Saunders, Jean Baptiste, and friends at HP.
Up on the small stage there were three HP enterprise execs. One talked about the new version of HP-UX and how it makes everything 30 per cent faster. Another person talked about blade servers and more performance per watt than competitors. I also heard several times that Sun is not a very good enterprise company, (I will follow up on that lead later.)
Ann Livermore, HP Services chief was supposed to be there but did not show up. Was it bait-and-switch? I don't know but it made me wonder: Why were the HP execs talking about operating systems and servers and not about IT solutions?
Whenever I used to hear Ann Livermore, or Carly Fiorina the message over the past seven years has been that HP is an IT solutions company. I didn't hear a thing about IT solutions, just a bunch of stuff about application performance from HP operating systems and servers. I didn't hear about any specific applications, just "average" applications, nothing about IT solutions of any kind.
HP, like a lot of enterprise companies seems to be stuck in the era of technology, which is very last century. Today, we have enough technology, what we don't have enough of is ways of using the technology in effective ways. Yet HP is still talking about hardware and software as if that was the thing that mattered the most.
Enterprises will not vault ahead in their competitive battles because they can run their applications 30 per cent faster.
Enterprises want IT that accelerates their bottom line by 30 per cent. That comes from clever IT solutions not from an operating system upgrade and a server blade swap, imho.
Tom Foremski reports on the business and culture of Silicon Valley at the intersection of technology and media. He also writes at Silicon Valley Watcher. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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