Big Blue Sam disses HP, lauds Ellison

Who's Big Blue's biggest problem going forward? Oracle. Who's the one IT company that IBM is not too worried about? Hewlett-Packard. So said Sam Palmisano, IBM's president, chief executive officer, and chairman, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. Palmisano rattled on for an hour, giving his normal speech about how …

[Daniel B.]

Right about HP's lack of R&D

But probably not just Hurd's fault. The death of PA-RISC was really the end of true HP iron; that death knell came when HP started promoting the Itanic boxes. Really sad, because the HP9000's are a fine piece of hardware; unfortunately HP decided to sell its soul to Intel. Oh well...

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought 3PAR was about storage and not not midrange iron

Can't recall where exactly I saw that (probably floating around the REG somewhere - no insider info here) but the implication was that the people who had built our EVA solution were gone and without the 3PAR acquisition our SAN line was, more or less, dead in the water from an evolutionary standpoint. So when Palmisano said we had no choice about 3PAR, we really didn't unless we wanted to abandon the Enterprise SAN market and I'm pretty sure that was all under Hurd's watch.

That said, I don't really disagree with you on your midrange points

[Matt Bryant]

RE: I thought 3PAR was about storage and not not midrange iron

That's the funny thing - the EVA products are still being developed and so are the XP line. Exactly where 3PAR will fit into the already crowded hp Storageworks range seems to be anyone's guess - my contacts in hp aren't saying even if they do know! I hear rumours that a new XP array (with a Px000 moniker) is due soon, along with the long expected next gen EVAs, so both lines seem to be still under development. If my money was on it, I'd have to say the XP would go after this next generation, mainly as it isn't really unique as long as HDS sell their version, whereas a 3PAR-based alternative would be. Given his head, I expect Donatelli to seriously tidy up the Storageworks bizz.

[Anonymous Coward]

That, and....

That, and the lack of evolution in HP-UX which, let's face it - is still just barely better than vanilla SysVR3.

Does HP actually do any R+D now? They just look like another beige box shifter

[Matt Bryant]

RE: That, and....

<Yawn> Oh, is that one of the bitter Sunshiners again? Still with the hp-ux FUD? In case you need reminding, it was Sun that died due to lack of Slowaris on SPARC sales. On the other hand, hp-ux on Itanium seems to be turning a profit, and picking up those refugee Sun shops (because hp bought EDS, which gives them a much better entry to those top-line 35,000 Sun customers than Snoreacle has without an enterprise UNIX sales force).

"....Does HP actually do any R+D now?...." I see that actually reading up on technology is also passe for Sunshiners now they're not being spoonfed by the Sunshine machine. Try Yahoogling for memristor and you'll see an example of real innovation happening at hp. And, unlike so many of Sun's so-called "innovations", memristors look like having a future. Enjoy!

/SP&L

[Nathan Meyer]

Choose Your Enemies

Mr. Palmisano would dearly love for all Enterprise system contests to be beween IBM and Oracle; because even if Oracle win the contract; they can't deliver.

Mr. Palmisano does not want people looking at a race beween HP NonStop and IBM.

When HP took over Compaq, HP also took over the NonStop systems, which remain the only workable threat to IBM's stranglehold on large corporate operational systems. Oracle can provide MIS wankers with eleventy-seven ways to mince a report; but the moneymakers still mostly have their systems of record on DB2, IMS and NoStopSQL/MP boxes.

As Mr . Palmisano alluded, it is fortunate for the Armonk Monster, that no head of HP has had a clue about what to do with Guardian; or how to invest in it's development. This utter cluelessness is perfectly represented by both Compaq and HP management ignoring a Tandem NonStop product (Pathway) perfectly positioned to take on the Internet transaction business, and instead investing in gutting their own architecture to poorly fake Apache on an imitation of Unix.

[Tom Samplonius]

Lack of RD, or lack of waste?

The thing is, that if HP invested more in R&D, would it have amounted to anything?

I saw a posting from the Personal Computing division complaining that their R&D budget was only 1.5% of revenue, and that of course they wouldn't be able to put out an iPad competitor at level. But would they have been able to do it at 2.5% or even 5%? Probably not.

The frontline HP staff can complain about the lack of R&D, but would they have delivered anything worth buying, had they been given the money? Seriously, of all of the company's in the world, does anything think that HP has the design expertise to make an competitor to the iPad that would have made money?

As far as HPUX, that ship sailed years ago. It was already dead when Carly took over. Too late to revive it now. HP was doing its "Windows NT is the future" thing for a while, and transferred a bunch of VMS tech to Microsoft, as HP hoped to offload the OS R&D to MS.

And NonStop? Seriously? Yes, great engineering, like 10 years ago. But an underpowered architecture today. Might as well buy the IBM crack, and get a mainframe. At least IBM mainframes are fast, and scale to huge workloads. Probably would cost the same, and at least IBM has a proven track record of support mainframe sites. Talk to a VMS user, about their confidence in HP.

[Matt Bryant]

RE: Lack of RD, or lack of waste?

".....Might as well buy the IBM crack, and get a mainframe....." The big problem for IBM is that the mainframe rip-off cannot continue indefinately. The IBM mainframe bizz is declining year on year, with enterprise UNIX and Linux gradually eating into it. The customers are looking for ways to get off the crack habit, and IBM knows this as shown by their ruthless pursuit of any company that threatens their racket. Examples such as PSI and Hercules show what happens if you threaten the IBM mainframe profits. An even bigger indicator as been IBM's push into services over the last two decades - IBM knows mainframe is dying. All it would take is a monopoly action in Europe or the US and IBM's golden goose is cooked.

So what happens when mainframe becomes an unprofitable business for IBM? P-series won't fill the gap, it has been heavily susidised by mainframes for years. The X-series is all but sold to Lenovo, desktops and laptops are gone, leaving storage and software. In storage, IBM's biggest enemy is EMC, not Snoreacle or hp, and in software the biggest growing threat is Microsoft. I'd say it's pretty safe to bet that when Sam says he is worried about Oracle he's really playing at distraction. For IBM, hp is a big threat in that it enables M$ to go after IBM, as when IBM loses the hardware deals to hp they also usually lose the software one as well.

[Kebabbert]

Tom Samplonius

"...At least IBM mainframes are fast, and scale to huge workloads..." Where are the IBM Mainframes fast? Charging the bill?

As I have showed earlier, you need ~10 Intel Nehalem-EX to match the biggest z10 mainframe with 64 cpus. So, where are they fast?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where's MB to defend his GF forever?

'nuf said. See title.

[Anonymous Coward]

@AC where's MB

maybe if I mention Sun he'll turn up ...

[Matt Bryant]

RE: Where's MB to defend his GF forever?

I was momentarily lost in the sheer granduer and eloquence of your statement. Never have I seen such amazingly profound technical views offered in such a precise and clear manner. Not!

In short, if you had nothing to say, you should have stopped yourself from posting, as you have added nothing to the discussion. Which is probably all your usual posts amount too. I too would post anon if that was the embarrassing sum total of my capabilities. Now, back to the kindergarten for you.

[Anonymous Coward]

errm Sam, what about XIV?

So HP's acquisition of 3par was cos they didn't have the R&D investment to do it themselves?

So if IBM _do_ make those investments, why did they buy XIV?

[Frank Van riet]

HP R&D vs IBM?

Well, for those that aree interested... in the whole of the IBM storage lineup, only 1 product family is true Blue : the the DS6xxx (over and out) and the DS8xxx series (these are evolutions of the old Shark technology). All the rest is OEM :

DS3xxx, DS4xxx, DS5xxx = LSI ; NAS boxes = NetApp ... and XIV is also bought in.. So where is that famous IBM R&D?