Tag: HP

Dell becomes the king of the servers

Posted on September 15, 2016 by - News

Michael DellNew numbers from the Gartner Group show that Dell has beaten HPE to the top spot for server shipments.

To be fair, though, the market shrank and worldwide server revenue is down 0.8 percent.  Shipments are up by two percent which means that there is some pretty nasty price cutting going on.

Everywhere except for Asia/Pacific and North America is in decline, though shipments in those areas grew by 5.6 percent and three percent respectively.

Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice president at Gartner said: “Dell garnered 19.3 per cent of the market and moved into the No. 1 position in worldwide server shipments due primarily to growth resulting from programmes it has in place in the Asia/Pacific region, most notably in China. However, HPE continued to lead the x86 market in revenue with 26 per cent of the market.”

He added: “x86 servers grew 2.1 percent in shipments and 5.8 percent in revenue in the second quarter of 2016.”

Dell’s strong performance did not see its revenues match the growth. HPE continues to hold more of the market share in revenue though that contracted by 6.4 percent year-on-year, while Dell saw almost 10 percent growth.

IBM’s server revenues dropped by 34.4 percent but then it did flog its business to Lenovo.

HPE’s shipments also contracted year-on-year, shrinking by more than 18 percent, while Dell, Lenovo, Huawei, Inspur and others pulled up their socks.

HPE brexits 220 staff

Posted on August 24, 2016 by - News

axeHPE is planning to remove 220 more jobs in the UK as part of its continuing culling of staff.

In a memo sent to staff, the rather long titled HPE UK and MEMA Vice President  of Infrastructure Technology Outsourcing (ITO) Maurice Mattholie says it is all part of its Workforce Management Programme which is the latest euphemism  for rampant stuff cuts.

However, the number of staff for the chop this quarter is not as bad as the last quarter when 500 HPE staff were asked to clean out their desks and exit the building with their belongings in a photocopy box.

Mattholie said HPE was talking to the UK Works Council and Trade Union representatives about the cuts.

“It is important to point out that we are fully committed to continuing to use redeployment and voluntary exits to manage WFM in the UK and Ireland…. It is expected that up to 220 positions within UK&I ITO will be impacted through WFM in Q4.

“Whilst I appreciate that this announcement may cause concern I am committed to providing regular updates to ensure that everyone is kept informed.

 

Channel partners positive about European changes

Posted on July 12, 2016 by - News

emcChannel partners across Europe appear to be an optimistic lot, unless you are talking about HP, according to figures gathered by beancounters at Context.

In the outfit’s ChannelWatch, channel partners generally approved of their distributers and even liked the move by Dell to buy EMC. If they were unhappy about anything it was the splitting off of HP.

Jeremy Davies, Context CEO and co-founder said that resellers were clear on their opinions, especially when it comes to how they rate their distributors where overall the verdict has been good.

The reaction towards distribution in the UK was particularly positive, with 40 per cent thinking their partners were ‘excellent’. That was higher than elsewhere in Europe, which in the case of France and Portugal had the lowest levels hitting the top mark.

The Context survey found more partners thinking of adding Dell to their lists in the next six months. However, HP is not doing so well with two thirds of respondents claiming that the firms split might make them less inclined to take on products in the future.

HP needs some more education

Posted on June 8, 2016 by - News


tumblr_mcexe0a4MI1rcf9cjo1_500The maker of expensive printer ink HP has announced the launch of a new education scheme which offers big discounts to schools.

Schools that buy HP hardware using one of its authorised resellers can get credits of up to £250 per device. These credits can then be redeemed in the form of education software, training and further hardware upgrades.

Neil Sawyer, education & channel director at HP said that HP  HP, we recognise that schools often face difficult decisions on where to invest their ICT budgets. We want to give schools access to the latest technology, matched with the best education software, training and support services on the market, so that they are truly getting the most from their ICT investment.” said .

The programme is available through the following HP education channel partners; XMA, Academia, European Electronique, C-Learning, Insight, Misco, System Active, Lanway and Getech.

Ian Cunningham, client commercial director at XMA, commented: “With the ability to instantly unlock additional budget through this excellent initiative, it gives educational establishments a greater opportunity to apply more focus on transforming learning outcomes for students and teachers whilst at the same time delivering a more engaging learning experience.”

Schools will be able to claim for device training days for staff and students on HP Windows 10 tablets or Google Chromebooks. A range of discounted software will also be available. Frog Software and eLearning solution provider bksb are providing their software via the programme.

A video thunderbolt hits Asus partners mispronouncing its name

Posted on April 28, 2016 by - News

zeus-personality-traits_55ac40ddd60b6667Taiwanese vendor Asus has released a video because it has had enough of its partners mispronouncing its name.

Most of them default to the classic “eh-sus” when it should be the more mythological pronunciation ‘Ay-Zeus.’

In a post on Linked In linking to the video, AZEUS’s UK marketing director John Swatton said he had “lost count” of how many people have asked him how to pronounce its brand over the past year.

This is despite Taiwan-based ASUS now being EMEA’s third-largest PC manufacturer, behind only HP and Lenovo, but people never get the pronunciation right.

“So our designers created a video using a radio ad that we ran last year. Hopefully the next time I’m cold-called, the caller might pronounce our brand correctly,” Swatton said.

“Originally named after Pegasus, the winged horse of Greek mythology, but now sounds like Zeus, the God of storms and thunder,” the video says.  Maybe they should have spelt it with a Z in the first place. Zeus might not be that impressed either, which is why our last Asus developed a sudden electrical fault which caused it to be packed off to Hades early.

Thin clients are thin on the ground

Posted on March 31, 2016 by - News, Products

skeleton-woman-615While thin client set ups have been touted as the “next big thing” for nearly two decades, it would appear that no-one can make cash from them.

Bean counters at IDC said that the market leaders HP and Dell suffered double-digit shipment drops last year. Apparently companies are walking away from, or cancelling their thin-client projects. Ironically mostly before the poor economic climate, thin clients were touted as a cost-saving measure.

Thin client projects are being canned or postponed in the face of the faltering economic climate and reduced public budgets, IDC said as it warned that shipments in the sector shrank last year.

According to IDC, thin and terminal-client shipments fell 6.9 per cent to 5.08 million in 2015, with market leaders Dell and HP enduring double-digit drops.

To be fair it is not all doom. Thin-clients did better than PCs which fell 10.6 per cent last year.  IDC insists that the outlook for thin clients and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) remains favourable, although people have been saying that since networking became a thing.

Jay Chou, research manager, worldwide enterprise client device trackers at IDC said that while there was a certain amount of slowdown expected as many organisations had just refreshed their systems a year or two ago, the extent of economic and currency-related issues had a definite impact in the budget and timeline of other projects which were supposed to be in the pipeline.

“Nonetheless, awareness around VDI continues to improve, and IDC does expect an improved outlook ahead, especially as companies begin to think about moving beyond Windows 7.”

While the PC market may be consolidating into the hands of fewer players, the same cannot be said of thin clients, where market leaders Dell and HP lost market share hand over fist during the year.

The US duo’s collective share of thin-client shipments fell from 55.1 to 50.6 per cent between 2014 and 2015, with Dell seeing shipments drop 13.8 per cent and HP suffering a 15 per cent fall, IDC said.

NComputing came third as its shipments rose 12.8 per cent to 518,000, IDC said.

Windows 10 not helping to push PC sales

Posted on February 29, 2016 by - News

screen-shot-2015-11-02-at-81934-amThe maker of expensive printer ink, HP’s  Chief Executive Dion Weisler, said that Windows 10 was not helping push PC sales.He said that Windows 10 hasn’t delivered and there is not enough demand for Microsoft’s new OS to help HP survive in a declining PC market.HP delivered the first earnings report since its split. HP reported a 12 percent drop in revenue to $13.9 billion, and a 16 percent drop in continuing operations to $700 million. Virtually every meaningful segment of the business reported declines, including revenue and earnings in both its printer and PC businesses.

He blamed Microsoft which he said that made a  tremendous operating system platform, and universal apps and Continuum computing but failed to stimulate demand.

“We’re carefully monitoring any sort of price development that could further weaken demand,” Weisler said.

HP sold 14.2 million PCs during 2015, but still saw its market share drop by 10 percent—and it ranked second in worldwide PC sales behind Lenovo, according to IDC.  If HP can’t rely on Microsoft to provide the killer app, it might be its own PC future is limited.

HP scores huge Scottish contract

Posted on February 10, 2016 by - News

d0c5a0b6998666e50be87b41d1a5e246The former maker of expensive printer ink, the much divided HP, has been awarded single-supplier status on a £90 million Scottish framework project.

The cannae plan involves setting up a Desktop Client Devices and Associated Services framework across public sector organisations across Scotland, including health bodies, local authorities, universities and colleges, and other public organistaions.

According to the contract award notice from Scottish Procurement Under the deal HP will supply a range of mobile devices, tablets, other hardware and peripherals, will last for four years and is expected to be worth up to £90m.

HP  was named the single supplier in the notice but what is strange about the deal is that HP is keeping quiet about it all. It is not clear if HP has put its partners on alert that it will be needing them or asking for them to put in bids for the work.

In previous paperwork about the framework,  Scottish Procurement listed the benefits the framework will offer public bodies, including pricing which is “significantly lower” than that offered in the current market; fixed pricing for the duration of the framework; and “transactional efficiencies”, meaning e-procurement methods will be used.

HP pouring cash into Scality

Posted on December 16, 2015 by - News

INDUSTRY HP 1A few days after Scality and HPE storage announced a reselling deal, it has been revealed that the former maker of expensive printer ink wrote a cheque for $10 million into the object storage startup.

Scality’s mail product is its RING software storage which uses x86 servers and Linux with no kernel modifications. It can handle for hundreds of petabytes of data and continuous availability at scale, with the ability to serve the majority of storage workloads via file, object, and OpenStack-based interfaces.

The investment move adds to the story of the HPE Server-Scality reselling deal. It would appear that Scality has found its much needed sugar daddy.

Earlier this year, Scality announced a $45 million D-round of funding, taking total funding to $80 million so this HPE $10 million is part of it.

HPE’s move mirrors a similar push by Biggish Blue which bought Scality competitor Cleversafe.
All this money means that HPE likes Scality’s software and wants to help it in its bid to take on IBM in the business market.

Dell mocks HPE’s composing efforts

Posted on December 3, 2015 by - News

Larry_Nickel_composing_in_2004HP Enterprises composing efforts were dubbed a minor effort which will soon b flat, by Dell.

HPE this week unveiled plans to release the new composable architecture early next year. It’s being called Synergy, and HPE CEO Meg Whitman claimed the product was revolutionary.

We were suspicious because it involved the non-word Synergy and the word composable which keeps getting underlined by our word processor as being made up.  Tech companies use the word synergy and made up words when they are describing a non-event and hope that managers will nod when they see the outfit is talking jargon.

Dell also slagged off HPE’s new “composable” Synergy architecture, saying the new infrastructure product is impractical, expensive and doomed to be one of the IT market’s “derelict big ideas”.

Writing in his Dell bog, Dell fellow Robert Hormuth attacked the idea of composable infrastructure and the fact that it is “being driven by a single company”.

Hormuth said punters don’t want their infrastructure composable. They want approaches that work across many vendors and many technologies.

“Organisations require solutions that are simple, inexpensive, agile and scalable over proprietary, monolithic and expensive,” he said.

He said that the HP idea was only supported by HP. It is not open so it lacks flexibility and choice. “We’re looking forward to the evolution of standards-based approaches for composable infrastructure – which will inevitably increase customer choices and leverage expertise by controlling cost. After all, the marketplace is littered with derelict big ideas that were pushed by a single enterprise technology vendor. Right now, composable infrastructure could be one of those big ideas.”

Hormuth, in his blog post, touted Dell’s Active System Manager architecture as more practical, affordable and flexible than composable infrastructure.

HPE Vice President Paul Miller told  CRN, “If you don’t have a composable infrastructure yet, then of course it is not practical for you to sell one. What is not practical about having a system that gives you fluid pools of compute, storage and fabric, that enables you to stand up infrastructure for a workload in three minutes or less?”

The new HPE architecture is being billed as the first ever designed to bridge traditional and cloud-native applications into fluid resource pools that can be deployed at “cloud speed.” That could eliminate the big advantage that Amazon Web Services has had over internal IT departments that have struggled to provision workloads instantly like AWS can.

HP gets off of its public cloud

Posted on October 23, 2015 by - News

grandpa_simpson_yelling_at_cloudThe maker of expensive printer ink, HP is calling it quits on its public cloud offering.

The Helion Public Cloud will be abandoned next year as the vendor is more interested in private cloud products and rather scared of its chums Microsoft and Amazon.

HP has been denying that it will close Helion for six months, but the signs were there. In April, HP executive Bill Hilf said that HP no longer saw public cloud as a priority and that it made “no sense” for HP to go head to head with the likes of Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

He backtracked on this statement and said that HP would continue running Helion which operates  one of the largest OpenStack-based public clouds. Writing in his bog, Hilf confirmed what he denied six months ago and that Helion Public Cloud is doomed.

Hilf said HP has made the decision to “double down on our private and managed cloud capabilities” and confirmed that HP will “sunset” Helion Public Cloud on 31 January 2016.

Public cloud remains relevant to HP as part of its hybrid cloud strategy, but the vendor will now work with multiple partners such as Amazon to satisfy its customers’ public cloud needs.

“In order to deliver on this demand with best-of-breed public cloud offerings, we will move to a strategic, multiple partner-based model for public cloud capabilities, as a component of how we deliver these hybrid cloud solutions to enterprise customers,” Hilf said.

“Therefore, we will sunset our HP Helion Public Cloud offering on 31 January 2016.”

HP has been getting closer to Amazon of late as part of its hybrid delivery with HP Helion Eucalyptus. It has also worked with Microsoft to support Office 365 and Azure, he added.

“We also support our PaaS customers wherever they want to run our Cloud Foundry platform – in their own private clouds, in our managed cloud, or in a large-scale public cloud such as AWS or Azure,” Hilf said.

HP invested more than $1bn in its cloud business over two years when it unveiled its Helion range of OpenStack-based cloud products and services last May so it looks half that money was lost.

HP backs AMD to the hilt

Posted on October 7, 2015 by - News

AMD in BarcelonaDespite rumours of private equity money, and takeovers by people as diverse as Microsoft and even HP, it appears that AMD is still getting the kind of support it needs from partners in its egosystem (sic).

Here at the Canalys Channel Forum (CCF) conference in Barcelona, HP went out of its way to give AMD express backing and even exclusivity in the way of product launches.

Of course, there is nothing particularly new about this. I am staying at the Princesa Sofia hotel in Barcelona and it was here, now more than 20 years ago, that Compaq CEO Eckhard Pfeiffer lit out at Intel for messing with its customers’ minds. Wasn’t this also the venue for ex CEO Jerry Sanders III to declare that “with Microsoft and Intel we make the Holy Trinity?”  I think it was.

Compaq was eventually swallowed up by the HP body corporate in the shape of Winsome Carly Fiorina but it has always given AMD a fair crack of the product whip.

AMD showed off two devices that will be sold into the channel worldwide – a highly dense little jobbie that seems to have more specs than you can shake a fist at and will hang on the back of your HD monitor – and a rather light notebook that is also highly specced and soon to be released as part of the Elite family.

Of course, getting the spinners or the suits to talk about acquisitions and the like is like trying to get a spider out of its web. But, nevertheless, it seems clear that quite a few AMD suits now appear to be HP people out of Grenoble.

An HP source, who declined to be named, suggested to Channel Eye that Intel doesn’t mind these kind of exclusive deals because it will be in deep hot water if it has to go it alone.

More, if it transpires.

HP’s VSI is still running

Posted on September 21, 2015 by - News

INDUSTRY HP 1While it has been scaled back because many in the Channel hate it, HP’s daft Value System Integrator sales programme is still running.

The brilliant idea was started as a way to beat Dell on pricing by removing distributors from the supply chain and using that margin to give customers discounts.

It did not work very well and miffed the hell out of the channel. The cunning plan was that HP would not pay resellers any soft margin or marketing funds, just a one per cent rebate, and allow them to boost their coffers by wrapping products in their own tech services.

The model expanded to the private sector, and saw HP competing against its trusted channel allies.
VSI was one of two decisions which killed off HP’s business. The other one was to ask account managers in the Enterprise Group to manage PC resellers to build direct sales.

The move was great for Lenovo who suddenly had SCC, Softcat, Kelway and other big resellers wanting to work with them.

Apparently though HP has now re-purposed so that it is only used in the public sector again. Even that is less of a focus.

HP CEO Meg Whitman promised to remove channel conflict when she started, setting out rules to govern the behaviour of internal sales reps; and passed some enterprise accounts that were directly managed to channel types.

Microsoft delivers Surface through Dell

Posted on September 10, 2015 by - News

surface-pro-2Software giant Microsoft has unveiled a partnership to allow businesses to buy  Surface Pro tablets and Surface accessories through Dell’s enterprise sales division.

Starting next month, it is part of a cunning plan, which will involve Microsoft working with other companies like HP and Accenture on promoting its tablets for business use. In fact the idea seems similar to the one drafted up between Apple and IBM, only it is more likely to work as Microsoft and the others have more experience in the business market.

Dell will also make Microsoft’s tablets available through its online enterprise sales website later this year. Companies that purchase Surface Pro tablets through this partnership can also purchase Dell services, such as up to four years of a hardware warranty, ProSupport with Accidental Damage Service, and Configuration and Deployment Services.

HP will also be selling Microsoft’s tablet through its enterprise sales force, and will be offering a set of Care Packs to help companies plan, configure, deploy and manage a Surface Pro 3 rollout. In addition, the company plans to release “mobility workflow transformation tools and services” next year.

Businesses already buy services and support from Dell for other computers and servers and it means that Dell and HP will sell Microsoft tablets alongside their own tablets and 2-in-1 convertible PCs.

Microsoft has dubbed all this the Surface Enterprise Initiative. The programme could improve adoption from enterprises that want to purchase their technology products from a partner that can also provide service and support for deploying devices.

HP should buy EMC

Posted on July 3, 2015 by - News

INDUSTRY HP 1Analyst Raymond James has created a flap over his idea that now is the perfect time for HP to buy EMC.

James believes an acquisition deal between HP and EMC is a “distinct possibility” as HP inches closer to its company split date in November. The two companies agreed, at least once before, and had more than a year’s worth of merger talks before giving up, mostly on the matter of price.

Channel partners of both companies said the deal makes sense and would be beneficial to them and it is looking like other analysts agree.

Such a deal would improve HP’s cloud portfolio with VMware and Virtustream services, while EMC and Pivotal would boost the converged infrastructure and analytics side of the portfolio. HP provide some good mobile tech.

HP is splitting the enterprise divisions from the PC and print side of the business, and is certain to have that done by Christmas. HP CEO Meg Whitman has indicated further acquisitions and so it is possible that EMC is on the table.

HP Enterprise of the new HP – will be a lot more aligned with the current EMC and VMW businesses in terms of end-market focus.

A united company is worth $2 billion more. HP would kill off its 3Par storage over time, and EMC would shelve its Content Management in favour of HP’s Autonomy.