Glenn Keels, senior manager of Dell's commercial server team, takes to Dell's
corporate blog and points to a speech given last week by Hewlett-Packard Chairman and CEO Mark Hurd, in which Hurd reportedly said his goal was to drop operation and maintenance costs to 30 percent of Hewlett-Packard's IT budget, with innovation making up the other 70 percent:
Hurd said the company needs to reduce costs so it can invest more in innovation, a worthwhile goal indeed. Hurd said capital spending is flat, but IT maintenance and operations costs are climbing. He pledged HP would take maintenance and operations to 30% of the IT budget and innovation to 70%. We wholeheartedly agree with the goal of 30/70 and, in fact, we've made substantial progress toward this very same goal.
Keels lists six strategies Dell has undertaken over the past several years -- such as consolidation of servers and "rationalizing storage" -- and said, "We learned a lot from these six initiatives, and we are more than happy to 'open source' our experience to help other companies " including Mr. Hurd and HP " move toward 30/70."
Hurd has had several opportunities over the past several quarters - - when asked by financial analysts and reporters - - to discuss Dell's well-known set of woes, but has tended to stop shy of kicking his rival when it was down. It's unclear whether this will now change.
For what it's worth, HP last week said Gartner placed it in its "leader's quadrant" in "IT Project and Portfolio Management."
