Inevitable result of commoditised tin
Well, this had to happen for HP to stay in the game at all against the likes of IBM. Nobody gives a toss which data centre the tin is in, nobody gives a toss whose server chassis the virtual machine is running on either. Blade servers managed to slightly extend the myth that there is any differentiation in commodity servers but even that is now coming undone.
There are a few ways these companies can respond;
1) Recognise that this is all commodity now and join the race to the bottom
2) Move up the value chain with "Services" by buying or building capability (HP and Dell)
3) Try to stitch up the customers with a completely propietary stack all the way from the data centre to the software and maintenance contracts so that they can push the margins right back up (remember IBM mainframe licensing?)
Take your own guess which of these HP is going for having bought a data centre company and a services company, branded premium data centre sir?