Jim asks:

> What is HP's future when all it does is repackage
>  somebody else's products?  Why go to HP instead of Dell or
>  Gateway, or even generic Intel/AMD based systems?
>
>  These are not meant as rhetorical questions.  Just what is their
>  game plan?

If I had to guess, and it's only a guess on my part as well as HP's, I think
that they see a lot of their future with products such as "blade" servers,
running Linux. While you may not have heard of these devices, HP is quite
excited about them for several reasons: they are likely to become a commodity
item, and HP sees itself as potentially getting into that commodity market
space firstest with the mostest, and thus carving out a substantial niche for
itself, in great part because other organizations are currently ignoring it.

Secondly, these are basically customerless products, completely unlike the
market the HP3000 served. They require virtually no support, no software
development, and no long-term involvement with the customer. If a unit fails,
you simply pull it out and replace it with a twin spare unit, potentially
made by anyone, but preferentially by HP.

These sorts of utility computers have real value for a very select market
segment, in areas such as web servers and telecommunications, but of course
they will generate no sense of brand recognition because no one other than
their owners will know what brand of server is actually being used. For
highly specialized tasks that can be partitioned into a large number of
individualized computational units, at least on a medium scale, this sort of
hardware makes sense. These devices behave more like instruments than general
purpose computers.

A number of the people at CSY, including Winston Prather, have already moved
over to new divisions within HP to support this new effort.

At the other end of the scale, HP also hopes to become a real force in the
enterprise-scale supercomputer market, running HP-UX, although I much greater
doubts that they can make as much of a dent in this market.

Under any circumstance, you can look at HP's products page and see their
strategy plainly written out in a very few words: "blade servers, server
appliances, tower servers, rack-optimized servers, super scalable servers."
HP has become completely OS-agnostic, supporting what they've calling their
"Three OS Strategy", Linux, NT, and HP-UX, whatever the customer wants. The
product-differentiating factor that they're now chosen to emphasize lies
almost wholly in form factor, providing the right style of box for the
customers' needs.

Wirt Atmar

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