Sun sounds HP death knell in enterprise space

HAVING SUCCESSFULLY pinched a HP customer in Oz last week, Sun trumpeted the achievement in a press release on Monday.

The company claimed the move by Data Action, a retail banking services company in Australia, to replace its HP server and storage environment with Sun kit demonstrated the success of its 'HP Away migration programme'.

Brian McCulloch, chief executive officer of Data Action said HP was asked to, "demonstrate a life cycle for its hardware and a true growth path, not just blue sky technology. They recommended we switch to their new Itanium technology, which did not satisfy our needs. It lacked a proven direction or growth path, and, at the time of benchmarking, also required a move to an as yet unproven release of Sybase."

The statement was a rarity, senior vice president of Sun's Global information systems strategy office, Larry Singer, told the INQUIRER earlier today.

"It's what we hear customers telling us every day," he claimed, "But it's unusual for people to say that in public." When you're dealing with an $80 billion company you never know where they'll be tomorrow, suggests Singer, "People are loathe to say the emperor has no clothes, but this emperor is frigging naked!”

Singer says Sun hears a consistent message from HP customers: "They have no idea where HP is going." Even Intel, he says, has begun to eschew the Itanium in favour of Montecito* but when you talk to HP they have one direction - Itanium**. "There's no roadmap, no strategy, other than wait and see - no-one believes the story any more. They've lost position in storage and they're becoming irrelevant in the enterprise space."

Singer is obviously keen to rubbish HP, but claims the situation is one the $80 billion giant has created itself. "HP, he says, "is in the position we were in for a while, with customers saying ‘you can't tell us where you'll be in six months'. In Sun's case the problem was finance. HP's problem is architecture, and a lack of commitment to enterprise space."

Sun says it works with ISVs and partners who help identify customers ripe to fall to the HP Away programme by dumping HP to embrace Sun. These, it woos at analyst luncheons and the like, offering special promotions and discounts usually only available to established enterprise customers.

"Customers know they have to move," says Singer. "In a sense, we're just holding up our hands saying we have an alternative."

Singer maintains the lack of strategy and direction at HP has become transparent to its to customers. "If you chase the decision up the stack to the OS, you realise HP's OS has had no major release since Fiorina took over," he says. "People only have three legitimate OSes: Windows, Red Hat or Solaris. As soon as HP talks to 9900 or Alpha customers they have to say HP does not have an OS.

"HP salesmen have to feed their families," he says, "they may start off offering Itanium but when time to close deal, they'll put up the AMD offering, and we have the best price performance on Opteron. Once they open door to industry standard performance, they let us in."

In the corporate world, price and service often take second place to the relationship between buyer and seller. It's what HP used to be good at, says, Singer, but not any more. "In any kind of relationship you have to be dependable and reliable. HP has always been good at looking after its customers. Loyalty and innovation provide a phenomenal basis to grow company. But, when Carly came, that all went out the door. Decisions became top-down, you even had a founder complaining of the culture change. Now, they're defending an incomprehensible strategy: neglecting the enterprise space by promoting itself as a consumer-oriented company."

"It's a struggle to defend, he says. "In a relationship you can tell when they're having a hard time, when they're thinking, 'Oh shit, we're in trouble,' you can see it on their face." µ

* The up-coming dual-core Itanium
** Sun usually refers to Itanium as the Itanic, for some reason.