Posts by Scott Handy

IBM chases HP (and Sun) with tiny mem prices

Re: If you can't beat them, join them

Hey - "Cheers from the UK!" ...love to write THAT story up (grin). [e-mail] if you'd be willing to do a reference. (might now use the koolaid pun but we can have fun with it). Would be great for our next launch ...Good to have happy clients and also you "get it" on the more workloads can be driven if we make bigger memory configs more affordable (seems like "By exit..quit" feels the same). I'd be happy with a simple quote to put on some sales charts all the way up to a full case study and press release and or web video......and happy to give you a personal Power7 disclosure in return. Scott Handy - VP WW Strategy, Marketing, and Sales Support, IBM Power Systems.

Oracle, Sun speed-launch Exadata V2

What does IBM think?

Except for flash, the integrated nature of this sounded very similar to what IBM announced in July with the Smart Analytics System -- highlighting high performance and low costs. And of course all Power servers now support flash as do many of our x86 servers and storage arrays, but that was of course not mentioned.

I also find it interesting, just like last year's Exadata announcement, there was a significant difference between the cost in the announcement versus the true costs; e.g., they left out the Oracle software costs which often are equal or greater than the severs itself. And the scale out of this make for more licenses - which is why oracle likes it ("spend less on hardware so you can spend more with us" I often hear them say). We do a good business with Oracle on scale-up and even RAC on Power Systems (it a huge revenue and profit generator for them) so surprised they trashed us so hard. As we take more HP/Sun UNIX share that growth continues with Oracle on Power so they do benefit from our gain.

It was interesting that this is an x86-based system after Sun just ran full-page ads in the last few weeks attempting to calm fears regarding commitment to Sun's SPARC ;-) (sly grin)

So its clear they are panicked, bumping up the Oct 14th announcement since the Sun business is imploding while Power takes very, very significant share - which I view as customers voting with their wallets. We took 7.4 pts UNIX share (that's a LOT in a $18B/year market - UNIX is still 30% of all customer spend on servers each year) per IDC just in 2Q!! (In past years I'd have been happy with that type of gain over a whole year. To get 7.4pts share grab in Sun's fiscal 4th quarter? Its called an implosion, and hence panic has ensued.

Longer term, IBM has logged 1,800 customer migrations to Power Systems from 2006 thru 2Q09, including 815 versus Sun (250 in 1H09 alone, 170 servers, the rest storage/tape) and 753 versus HP. That’s an average of one customer per day moving to IBM. And on top of that, IBM Software Group reported more than 100 SAP clients alone have switched from Oracle Database to DB2 in the last six months for higher performance and lower cost.

IBM has the technology lead across servers, storage and database software -- and customers see it and are switching -- this trend will continue.

Scott K. Handy, VP, Worldwide IBM Power Systems Strategy, Marketing and Sales Support.

IBM euthanizes aging Power gear

If you already bought 'em, you can activate 'em

You can still activate any inactive processors you already have. And they did teach me 'don't be draconian' in customer value prop school. ;-) We are withdrawing some processor upgrades within a model of some of the POWER5 systems where we offered them, but if they already have processors that can be activated with Capacity on Demand (COD), that's still supported. We also stopped supporting activations during the order process (you can still however, activate the processors after you get the box), for some of the first POWER6 systems which have been superseded by newer/faster models, but again, if a client owns inactive processors on an existing Power5 or Power6 box, those are unaffected. Hope this helps! (Scott Handy, VP WW Strategy, Marketing, Sales Support - Power Systems, IBM).

IBM waterboards PA-RISC Superdome from HP

Stunningly, people are still buying PA-RISC

As usual, the article is funny and it gets our message across so thanks.....I do have to say that I agree PA-RISC is aging and not competitive anymore (your depiction that we are skinning a corpse is a bit rough, buy hey, its a free country). But its very worth noting that people are still buying this PA-RISC stuff! (apparently against the advice of Anonymous coward, 2 posts before mine). Hence our targeting. The facts.....from HP's Feb 19th earnings call transcript, they said "Business critical systems revenue grew 1% year-over-year. Integrity server revenue grew 37% ("offset by declines in PA-RISC and Alpha" according to the press release) and now represents 75% of BCS mix." That means that 25% is not Integrity (ie Itanium-based) and not x86 either (that's in the Industry Standard Servers bucket) so the rest is PA-RISC/Alpha (most of that has to be PA-RISC). And 25% is, by my calculation, $216M in the quarter. So if people are still spending hundreds of millions on PA-RISC and given it is that non-competitive then it tells us they are still resisting the multi-year plea by HP to have them recompile/migrate to Integrity Systems based on Itanium. Plus - they have to move somewhere since HP has suggested PA-RISC systems won't be sold after year-end (this year) so time is running out. They need alternative options. So we want to (and believe we have valid reasons to) offer them an attractive upgrade and rebates and help with migrations. Those still buying PA-RISC systems that are reading your article will get it, I hope ;-) ...a nice article, nonetheless...thanks.

Scott Handy, VP, WW Marketing and Strategy, IBM Power Systems