HP takes one in the servers

Re: Expect HP's BCS to crater in 1Q

This is hurting HP so bad. They must've lost many hundreds of millions in sales due to the late shipment of Tukwilla, including many large customers who will not return. And don't forget that Tukwilla will also have to compete head on with the 8-core Nehalem-EX, bundled with Itanium-like RAS features such as Machine Check Architecture Recovery. I see no long term future to this architecture any more. Intel will have to ship it and HP build systems around it to meet existing contractual arrangements, but how long can they seriously pretend this is a viable business if demand continues to drop off like this. Their only hope is to continue to converge the Integrity Itanium line of systems with their Proliant and Blade products to reduce the investment needed to bring Itanium systems to market. But this also weakens Itanium's value proposition if a Nehalem-EX system is identical to a Tukwilla system except for the cpu; but trashes Tukwilla on performance at a lower price point. Tukwilla's only appeal then is to incumbent HP-UX, OpenVMS and NonStop customers who don't wish to change their software platform. It certainly won't appeal to new customers, unless the customer is clueless and the salesman is very artful.