VAR caution at HP Adaptive strategy

Vendor unveils product line-up for responsive IT environments

Hewlett-Packard (HP) last week unveiled new products to boost its Adaptive Enterprise strategy, but resellers were cautious about the vendor's plans.

The Adaptive Enterprise strategy, like IBM's On-Demand Computing, aims to create responsive IT environments.

At its ENSA conference in Munich, HP showed its Integrity server range with mx2, a new dual-processor module allowing two 64bit Itanium chipsets to be plugged into systems for 128bit processing power.

Nora Denzel, HP's general manager of the Adaptive Enterprise and software business unit, claimed the servers could be competitively priced, "turbo-charging" the datacentre.

HP's StorageWorks Reference Information Storage System, a content archiving and retrieval system, was also unveiled at the event.

Although many partners CRN spoke to did not know about the ENSA event, Jim McDonnell, senior vice-president of HP solution partners organisation, said 25 per cent of the 4,500 attendees were from the channel. He added that it gave VARs the chance to find out about new products.

"The new opportunity is around Blade and Integrity (servers)," McDonnell said.

But Paul Musgrove, managing director of reseller PS Office Supplies, said HP's Adaptive Enterprise strategy is "too much, too soon, for too many".

He added: "At the moment there are just too many uncertainties surrounding this kind of strategy for it to take off."

HP also promised to step up its total print management programme, which it claims uses multifunction devices to cut end-user costs by up to 30 per cent.

Sue Richards, managing director of HP Centre of Excellence EBM, said: "Customers are listening and it is working for us."

[email protected]