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HP Doubles Down On Storage
12:00 AM EDT Mon. Jul. 16, 2007
From the July 16, 2007 issue of CRN
Page 1 of 3
Long-term HP partners, however, say that while the new products look good, the company's latest channel program could be a bust.
What HP needs more than anything else right now is a long-term vision that it can clearly and consistently execute on, said Rich Baldwin, president and CEO of Nth Generation Computing, a San Diego-based solution provider and one of HP's biggest storage partners.
"Remember back five years or so ago they had ENSA?" asked Baldwin, referring to the Enterprise Network Storage Architecture. "It was a clearly articulated, five-year vision. They don't have that now. They've been dealing with point products. But the long-term strategy, road map, vision, is not there."
HP's total storage revenue grew an anemic 1 percent from the second quarter of 2006 to the second quarter of 2007, compared with 8 percent from the second quarter of 2005 to the second quarter of 2006.
HP was the second largest storage vendor in 2006, with total disk storage revenue of about $5 billion, according to research firm IDC. However, that represented growth of only 2.7 percent over 2005, the slowest of the top five vendors and well behind overall industry growth of 6.0 percent, IDC said.
The situation was even more dire in terms of external disk storage systems, which does not include server-attached drives. IDC said HP revenue in this market grew only 0.9 percent from 2005 to 2006, lower than the other major vendors and far off the 8.0 percent overall industry growth.
Against this backdrop, HP decided to break with tradition and bring in an outsider to head its storage business. That outsider, Dave Roberson, former president and CEO of Hitachi Data Systems, on May 30 took over as senior vice president and general manager of HP's enterprise storage business. The two companies have a long-standing relationship in the storage space, as HP OEMs its flagship XP family of storage arrays from HDS.
"Thank God," said Nth Generation's Baldwin of the Roberson hiring. "This is exactly what HP needed: recognized leadership from the outside."
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