HP spreads FUD about competitor.
Film at eleven.
The volume of noise from anxious biz customers and some channel types over Lenovo's buy of IBM's x86 server biz is deafening the ears of those gentle folk at HP. At least that is what Bill Veghte, global boss of HP's enterprise biz, told us, and given rivals' efforts to highlight HP's slips in recent years who can blame him …
My thoughts exactly!
IBM has been all but invisible in the SME market for X86 products. For at least the past 3-4 years, the only real options were HP or Dell, though IBM had products, getting details and prices were nearly impossible.
Lenovo might help break the current Dell/HP status quo and bring some needed competition/innovation.
Where am I getting that info?
I built and shipped the damn things. By the thousands at the factory.
Admittedly, that was a few, though not many, years ago. (WAY past the NDA, BTW) The only difference between them and the HPs was the faceplate and loaded software.
I know more about HP servers and who buys them than I ever wanted to.
Thanks for the update Graeme. I missed the contract change over. As for 10 years ago, they were still being made by HP just 4 years ago. I was there.
Maybe 10 years or so ago (maybe less), but not now. Cisco's video servers were just rebadged Proliants. Cisco & HP used to be very cosy, to the extent that HP reps got paid more for selling Cisco switching than they did for selling HP switching. Then they bought 3Com/H3C and Cisco spat the dummy.
"Customers and partners are concerned. They are concerned about what the future will be for them – not only in the product but also in support and services," claimed the exec veep and GM of the Enterprise Group.
hahaha, that's rich coming from HP considering their recent changes to support.
in snaffling Big Blue's x86 division it [Lenovo] will leap into second spot in the global sales stakes
The problem is many governments, and their contractors, are forbidden from buying Lenovo (read: Chinese) products. Both the U.S. and U.K. military have Lenovo on the "Do not buy" list.
Despite the fact that I'm grateful to HP for overpaying for my Autonomy shares, I will still not forgive them for selling me an inkjet printer in which the total capacity of all five reservoirs is less than that of the monochrome HP printer which it replaced, such that it is for ever running out of ink. You can only expect to get away with a stunt like that once.
HP should either find some something useful to do or sell out to the highest bidder; its glory days are long over.
Despite the fact that I'm grateful to HP for overpaying for my Autonomy shares, I will still not forgive them for selling me an inkjet printer in which the total capacity of all five reservoirs is less than that of the...
I can't forgive HP for their 24MB printer drivers, 3MB of which is the driver and 21MB is HP bloatware that hooks into your system like a virus, installing many run-on-start programs, and checks for updates every half hour.
Good luck trying to uninstall these programs as they leave residue that haunts you with problems for years.
"Veghte said customers tend to buy servers with storage and reckoned there will be a "gap" in Lenovo's portfolio."
That is obviously not the case. EMC, no servers, is the long time market share leader in storage. NetApp doesn't even have a full featured storage portfolio, let alone servers, and it doesn't seem to have hurt them. HDS, no servers or anything else, and a much larger storage market share than HP. Cisco, when they were a pure play networking provider, trounced HP's wider portfolio in the networking space. Cisco is now the fastest growing server provider despite having no storage.
Ironically, the only company that has been top of market in servers and storage has been IBM (formally market share leader in servers and number 2 in storage).
""Customers and partners are concerned. They are concerned about what the future will be for them – not only in the product but also in support and services," claimed the exec veep and GM of the Enterprise Group."
Well, Lenovo wants to be in that space and IBM wanted out. So there should be little concern to the customers. Companies that used IBM Thinkpads are typically still using Lenovo Thinkpads.
How's HP's after-sales service? While it's not a server, I have a Lenovo laptop, personally, and it's just a mid-range E145. The other day, the keyboard went wonky, all the keys on the left resulting in weird output. It must have been hardware, because I could not use those keys even in BIOS settings. I phoned Lenovo support with a heavy heart, expecting a long call for little result, but just 15 mins later, I was assured a replacement keyboard would be with me the following day. We live in a rural area where deliveries are notoriously poor, so imagine my surprise when a courier from Glasgow phoned to make sure I someone was home. The upshot was that the machine was repaired less than 21 hours after placing the call. Fantastic service, I'd say, and if they respond like that with SME servers, bring it on.