HP TURNS ITS GUNS ON IBM SOURCE

As reported by the451, In danger of losing the No. 2 Unix server position to IBM, Hewlett-Packard has refocused its sales strategy and is developing a four-pronged product and marketing campaign specifically targeted at Big Blue.

HP's move, an acknowledgement of the threat from IBM's greatly improved Unix server business, is a significant shift of focus. Until now, the company has almost exclusively targeted market leader Sun Microsystems.

HP will tell analysts that it's developing a program of product and marketing initiatives with Oracle that targets IBM DB2 users. The company says it will develop a similar initiative with Microsoft.

HP will also begin attacking what it has labeled IBM's "Linux lunacy," Big Blue's almost maniacal effort to get Linux up on all of its products and recommend it for use in every type of application.

The one significant piece HP still lacks in measuring up to IBM is consulting and professional services. Until HP nails this, following its aborted acquisition of PricewaterhouseCoopers, it simply won't be able to compete here, it admits.

HP has recently taken steps to straighten out its sales channel, which has been the cause, it says, of some of the lackluster performance of its computer systems group, especially the high-end Superdome business. When it launched Superdome last fall, HP gave its sales force carte blanche to pursue every opportunity. That put its direct channel into conflict with its resellers, causing confusion in the market.

In its new so-called hardeck sales strategy, its top 100 accounts are now the exclusive domain of its own sales force. Above the deck, resellers and its own sales team can pursue opportunities. HP didn't say how many Superdomes it has actually sold, but it claims that Cisco has 12 and that it has shipped 16 to customers in China.

The measures are all part of HP's renewed effort to boost its ailing computer systems business. On the product front, the HP 9000 servers will be upgraded to the PA-8700 CPU through this year. It has PA-8800 and PA-8900 follow-ons in the pipe. PA-8900 is due in 2003, and computer systems CTO Ed Yang said others will follow if required. However, HP expects that, by that time, the second-generation McKinley version of Intel's IA-64 architecture will prove compelling enough for its PA-RISC customers to make the switch.

At the recent Intel developer's forum, HP showed HP-UX, Linux and a beta version of the 64-bit Windows 2000 running on a prototype McKinley system. The company says it took only three weeks to get from tape-out to working silicon. In the labs, it's working on a 50,000-node server.

HP won't have a high-end Windows 2000 Dacenter product in place until McKinley arrives. Yang said HP decided not to go ahead with its plan to resell Unisys' 32-way ES7000 Windows 2000 Datacenter because it looked at the take-up rate of Datacenter and decided there simply isn't a business there yet.

HP's first Itanium IA-64 systems will be launched at the end of this month.

At the other end of the business, HP recently hired Ian Morris from Motorola to head up its Internet appliance and embedded systems group, which has also been given responsibility for PCs.