HP's New PC, Printer Group To Target Dell

See "HP Combines Printing And PC Groups"

"Our plan is to have the new imaging and personal systems group be a head-on competitor to Dell," said Ann Livermore, the executive vice president of HP's Technology Solutions Group, who participated in an online chat with reporters following HP's announcement today of software enhancements to its Integrity server family. "We believe the combination of PCs and printers will be particularly strong in the consumer space. You can already see this in the digital-entertainment solutions that HP offers. In the commercial marketplace, there are many customers who think about end-user computing, which is a combination of PCs, printers, as well as networking solutions."

Livermore also served notice that HP would seek out customers who might be looking to bolt Lenovo following its recent purchase of IBM's personal systems business. "In terms of HP vs. Lenovo, we have an incredible amount of fear and uncertainty in the marketplace created by the Lenovo announcement that creates an incredible opportunity for HP," she said. "We have sales programs for customers worried about the IBM announcement."

On the services front, Livermore hinted that HP might be poised to widen its profile. "Our business strategy for the consulting organization is to focus on those areas where HP has unique intellectual property and to team with our systems-integration partners where we don't have unique expertise," she noted. "Our services business is growing faster than IBM's and almost every other competitor. So we think that our strategy of being deep and strong is better than being an inch deep and a mile wide, like some of our competitors are."

During the online chat, Livermore also had to parry some pointed questions. Asked why HP is investing more in Itanium than Dell or IBM, Livermore answered: "Because we're a lot smarter than they are! Dell has no high-end systems strategy, and IBM has chosen to invest in its Power5 architecture, which doesn't have nearly the ISV support or the total dollars of investment."

As for the Integrity announcement which preceded Livermore's chat, HP said that Intel's next-generation, high-end Itanium 2 processor is now available throughout the Integrity line. HP also released a new version of the OpenVMS operating system running on Integrity. (OpenVMS is positioned as a migration path for users currently using Alpha-based servers.) Finally, the company announced new virtualization and disaster-recovery features for the servers.