Archive for February 29, 2012

Smarter Planet, Smarter Planning?

February 29, 2012 / Rick Whiting / One comment

A few general comments by an IBM executive about the company’s 2004 decision to sell off the company’s PC business has – intentionally or not – highlighted the widely different states in which IBM and rival Hewlett-Packard find themselves today.

The decision to divest IBM of its PC business was a bold step that a few years later led to the company’s launch of its “Smarter Planet” initiative, argued Jon Iwata, senior vice president of marketing and communications, speaking at the IBM PartnerWorld Leadership Conference in New Orleans Tuesday.

“At the time we divested of the PC business we had a user base of 100 million,” Iwata said, noting that the decision eliminated all IBM sales to individuals and transformed the vendor exclusively into a business-to-business company. “It was not obvious at the time, perhaps you would agree, that this was the right move to make.”

In 2008 IBM unveiled its Smarter Planet initiative, which promotes the sale of IBM technology for embedded applications and instrumentation in everything from traffic control systems to “intelligent” power grids.

Iwata said Smarter Planet, while coming four years later, resulted from the decision to sell off its PC business to China-based Lenovo. “It wasn’t sufficient to say we were in a post-PC era,” he said. “People wanted to know what era we were moving into. We knew what we were getting out of. What were we getting into?”

At no point did Iwata mention HP, and it’s not clear whether he intended any such comparisons. But they were there, nevertheless.

Hewlett-Packard has spent much of the last year wrestling with its strategic direction – including announcing at one point that it would spin off its Personal Systems Group and then reversing that decision less than three months later.

Iwata said the decision to exit PCs and get into Smarter Planet has paid off for IBM with improved profitability and brand awareness. “It turned out to be the right call,” he said, and praised then-CEO, now chairman Sam Palmisano by saying: “He got us out of the old, he got us into the new.”

Iwata’s declaration of victory sounds a bit premature. Some still scratch their heads over just what Smarter Planet is and how much of a market it really is for IBM and its partners. (Although the fact that Warren Buffet acquired 5.5 percent of IBM’s stock last year, praising IBM’s management and strategic direction in the process, has to count for something.)

Point is, IBM has developed a vision of the future – both for itself and for information technology – and has committed to a strategy to get there. That’s something that HP can’t say right now.

Category: Applications and OSes, Channel News, Client Devices, Cloud, Data Center / Tags: , , ,

Where’s The Converged Infrastructure At, Dell?

February 27, 2012 / Joe Kovar / No comments

Dell seems allergic to the term “converged infrastructure,” despite the fact that it is the direction in which the company is moving.

Dell on Monday Feb. 27 had a press conference to unveil its new G12 servers, new EqualLogic arrays, and a new Force10 networking architecture, as well as talk about its acquisition of physical and virtual server backup software developer AppAssure.

Gosh, you put all that together and what do you have? Converged infrastructure.

Converged infrastructure is the putting together of server, storage, and networking technologies under a single management system for use in building data center and cloud infrastructures. And Dell is, for now, the only company other than HP to really demonstrate the ability to bring together all those parts. Cisco comes close, but without a storage offering it depends on partners EMC and NetApp to build converged infrastructures.

Dell doesn’t call what it’s doing “converged infrastructure.” When yours truly asked Arpit Joshipura, head of product management and marketing for Dell Networking, why that was, his response was that the term “converged infrastructure” was too broad in its meaning, much like the term “cloud.”

It’s true that “cloud” as a word has as many different definitions as there are people who use the term. But has anyone ever tried to talk about cloud computing without saying “cloud?” Try it. Go ahead, try it.

I thought not.

Converged infrastructure is in a similar situation. While each vendor approaches the concept in a slightly (or maybe not so slightly) different fashion, the point is that the term “converged infrastructure” is already familiar to anyone in the data center industry. You say “converged infrastructure,” and folks know what you are talking about, even if their definition is different.

Dell prefers to use the term “end-to-end solution” to refer to what everyone else calls “converged infrastructure.” However, yours truly believes that “end-to-end solution” is as overly used as “converged infrastructure” and refers to a helluva lot more different products and offerings.

Let’s just agree to say, “It is what it is.”

Category: Channel News, Cloud, Data Center, Networking, Storage / Tags: , , ,

HP Partners Puzzled By Stephen DeWitt’s Absence From GPC

February 21, 2012 / Kevin McLaughlin / No comments

Stephen DeWitt has been a visible figure in the Hewlett Packard channel, which is why many HP partners were confused by his apparent absence from last week’s Global Partner Conference in Las Vegas.

According to several HP partners who attended GPC, HP officials consistently deflected their questions about DeWitt’s current and future role at the company. However, rumor has it that DeWitt will be joining Dave Donatelli’s $22 billion Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking (ESSN) division, and that HP will announce the appointment soon.

To say that DeWitt, senior vice president and general manager of Hewlett Packard’s WebOS business unit, has kept a low profile in recent months would be an understatement. DeWitt was named to head up HP’s WebOS business in an executive reshuffle last July, but has been practically invisible since HP shut down its WebOS hardware business last fall.

In an interview last month, HP CEO Meg Whitman told CRN that DeWitt has been working on strategic projects and will soon be taking on a new position. “I think we’ve got a really good assignment for Stephen, so stay tuned,” Whitman said at the time.

DeWitt’s fiery competitiveness was on display at HP’s Americas Partner Conference last March when he called out Apple for ignoring the channel and suggested that HP’s strength in this area could prove an important differentiator in the mobility space. Even after HP scuttled the Touchpad, DeWitt insisted that WebOS would eventually be the operating system linking a wide range of connected devices.

“The WebOS is not dead,” DeWitt said at the time. “We’re going to continue to evolve it, update and support it. We stand by it.”

DeWitt’s communication skills, as well as his energetic style and deep industry knowledge, will be valuable assets to HP no matter what role he ends up playing, one partner told CRN. “I’m glad he is still there and I hope they find a role for him,” said the source.

Category: Channel News, Client Devices, Data Center / Tags: ,

Whitmania Sweeps Across HP Channel At GPC

February 17, 2012 / Kevin McLaughlin / No comments

HP CEO Meg Whitman’s keynote at this week’s Global Partner Conference was resoundingly well received, but at one point, it looked as if her channel debut would be delayed. That’s because the Aria hotel’s fire alarm system went off during the Wednesday morning keynote, about 30 minutes before Whitman took the stage.

Hayley Tabor, HP Software’s VP of business partnerships and field excellence, had just announced a new 10 percent rebate for ESSN partners that bring HP Software partners into deals when the hotel fire alarm interrupted her. She gamely continued her presentation until the all-clear signal came over the hotel’s public address system. HP Software chief Bill Veghte later joked that “This business is so hot, our competitors have to pull the alarm to disrupt us.”

While this was a false alarm, Whitman certainly has had to put out some figurative fires since joining HP last September, and she started her keynote by ticking down the list. She garnered three rounds of applause in the first ten minutes for vowing to keep HP on a hardware focused course and steer it away from the drama that has followed it in recent years.

When Whitman came on board, HP partners weren’t thinking about whether she’d guide the company long term — most were hoping she’d deliver the baseball equivalent of several scoreless innings of relief pitching. Whitman has done that in her five months at the helm, and partners are clearly impressed with her communication skills. More than anything Whitman said in her keynote, this is what’s fueling the most optimism in the HP channel in the wake of GPC.

Whitman also has a sense of humor: She started her keynote by informing the audience that they were “in luck” because she “only brought 56 Powerpoint slides”. Later, seeking questions from the audience during a Q&A, Whitman assured partners that no question would be too tough for her to handle. “You have to remember I ran for political office, nothing is going to hurt my feelings,” Whitman told the crowd.

Whitman says she wants to set up HP for the next 70 years, and what she means by that is that she sees the company at a critical turning point in its history, where the right decisions could, in fact, yield long term benefits. And when Whitman told of her desire to bring the “swagger” back to HP and the channel, it was impossible to not sense the adrenaline sweeping through the crowd.

Category: Channel News, Data Center / Tags: , ,

A Glimpse Of VMware’s Relaxed, Informal Corporate Culture

February 17, 2012 / Kevin McLaughlin / No comments

I’m wandering through the cavernous fifth floor hallway at the Venetian, trying to figure out where the VMware Partner Network Awards ceremony is taking place. There’s not a soul around, nor is there any tell-tale noise that might point me in the right direction.

It’s a bit creepy, and walking further down the hallway, it occurs to me that this looks like the set of ‘The Shining’, and I half-expect a kid in a Big Wheel to go zooming by, with creepy twins ready to confront me around the next corner.

Suddenly I sense someone walking behind me — it’s Paul Maritz, VMware’s CEO. He’s lost too, but then he sets off in the other direction, which turns out to be the right one, and I follow him into the ceremony room.

Seeing Maritz confused is an uncommon sight: He leads a company that continues to do a tap dance on the backs of virtualization rivals, and whose revenue grew 32 percent last year. Maritz runs an engineering driven company with an R&D team of 4,000 employees, and he often talks of the implications of the Post-PC era, and how companies will need to be nimble in order to continue attracting younger talent.

“I am a father to three millennials. They expect things to work in a certain way, and they want to receive information in context where they are and when they need it,” Paul Maritz said in his Partner Exchange keynote.

Maritz is easily the least pretentious CEO in the IT industry, and he’s not wearing a tie at the Partner Network Awards ceremony. Neither are the members of his executive team who join him onstage to present the awards to the winners and pose for photos. The way I see it, this is a sign of VMware’s relaxed and confident culture, and how a company that is still riding high on its first mover advantage in virtualization has managed to retain the feel of a startup.

And I think it all starts with Maritz, who’s like a cagy chess player who hasn’t even begun making his most strategic moves.

Category: Data Center / Tags: , ,
« Older Entries