2006 CHANNEL CHAMPIONS

Storage Management Software

Champ: Hewlett-Packard

CRN logo By Joseph F. Kovar, ChannelWeb

3:00 PM EDT Fri. Apr. 14, 2006
From the April 17, 2006 issue of CRN
Technical strengths made Hewlett-Packard the 2006 Channel Champion in storage management software.

Solution providers pointed to HP's new Storage Essentials software, and the software's integration with the AppIQ storage resource management technology the vendor acquired last year, as the reason for its strong showing in the technical areas of price/performance and multiplatform support.

"It's certainly more open than the others," said Dhruv Gulati, executive vice president at Lilien Systems, an HP partner in Larkspur, Calif. "Tying the server and storage management into a single scheme is a great concept."

As HP continues to integrate AppIQ technology, its Storage Essentials software becomes a way to look at both the storage and the server infrastructure, said Kathie Shenton, senior account manager at Select, a Westwood, Mass.-based HP partner. "By combining the two, you're on the way to managing both and seeing where problems between them lie," she said.

Solution providers did mark down HP significantly on one important technical criterion—product reliability—where it fell behind both EMC and Symantec.

Gulati said product reliability issues stemmed from the integration of AppIQ and Storage Essentials and were only temporary. "By changing horses in the middle of the race, HP will be better in the long term," he said.

On channel criteria, HP won or tied for first in six of nine areas, but took a big 5.7-point hit in the area of channel conflict. That caused it to fall behind IBM into a second-place tie with Symantec in channel program satisfaction.

Gulati said HP needs to plug holes in its Hard Deck program, under which the vendor pledged to lead with partners in all deals except certain top accounts. "It was supposed to be hard for HP to sell direct in partner-led accounts, but there are ways around it," he said.

That made it a tight contest in the end. In overall solution provider satisfaction, HP earned a 76.4, which was four-tenths of a point ahead of Symantec's 76. IBM and EMC tied for third with 75.5, and CA followed with 70.1.
Storage Management Software
 
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