HP acts to halt drop in storage revenue
New products and bundles aim to stave off growing competition
Hewlett-Packard (HP) unveiled a raft of products and bundles last week to help restore the performance of its storage and server businesses.
Carly Fiorina, HP's chief executive, recently blamed the enterprise storage and servers group (ESS) for the firm's lower than expected earnings, although overall sales for HP did meet expectations. Turnover in the ESS group fell by five per cent, with storage falling by 40 per cent since last year.
To combat this HP launched StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) bundles, integrating Fibre-Channel HP-branded 'FATA' disk drives, and the HP StorageWorks EVA3000 Starter Kit, which features a 2Gb Fibre-Channel SAN array integrated with hardware, software and services.
In addition, new processors and price reductions are designed to extend the life of the HP AlphaServer portfolio, due to be discontinued in 2006.
The company also unveiled a new version of the Unix operating system HP-UX 11i.
Thomas Ullrich, marketing director EMEA at HP's enterprise systems group, said: "The products will be sold through the channel, as well as directly. We have made it easy for everybody to sell them, but some of the bundled offerings were designed with the indirect channel in mind."
Donal Madden, HP enterprise products business manager at distributor Ideal, said: "We've had a very good year and the market is buoyant, but we are seeing very intense competition, particularly in storage."
Fiorina also said channel problems, such as compensation issues, aggressive discounting and a change in the claims process, had led to lower revenues in Europe.
Sue Richards, managing director of HP reseller EBM, said: "HP has realised it needs to be competitive on price. A lot of information was coming from the US, but it took longer to get direction in Europe after the merger [with Compaq]."