What Are HP and Hurd Up To?

I got something to say to Mark Hurd over at HP. Okay, we geddit Mark, you’re gonna beat us with a big stick called Ballmer. Not content with hiring our uber-manager Dave “Ninja Turtle” Donatelli you’re getting in bed with Redmond. Well, excuse me while I yawn.

You may have Dave and he may be free to work on storage now but we got the nearest thing to God in this business; we got Gelsinger. So anyway, you’re sucking up to Microsoft with this FrontLine schtick and putting in a quarter of a billion to get your products skin-to-skin with Hyper-V and System Center and whatever but it don’t amount to much at all really because we’re mounting a flanker on you.

Yep, we got NetApp, those Sunnyvale boy scouts, cosying up to Cisco and VMware and saying they’re better partners for them than we are at Hopkinton – like anybody will believe that, really! Chambers won’t be there – that tells everybody what he thinks about it – but it’s VMware baby, ESX all the way. Sure, NetApp has its Microsoft affair going full blast too but VMware is where the action is and everybody knows it.

We’ll have Paul Maritz sitting alongside Tom G at the VCN event on the 26th and he’ll pour smooth sauce all over Microsoft. He should be able to do that; he worked at Redmond alongside Ballmer. Hyper-V sucks; we all know it, it’s the Vista of virtualisation, we just can’t say it – yet.

So what’s the real story with Donatelli? Because this ain’t it. Is it going to be this big EVA re-jig thing with X86 controllers taking on different storage personalities? You ducked starting over with the high-end refresh, going with that USP-V-on-steroids thing coming out of HDS. The Frontline money had to come from somewhere, right? Good luck. While that’s getting started we’re coining it with V-Max, like FAST – geddit? Hah!

No, Donatelli’s playground is gonna be the EVA re-invention. Mark, we looked at this. I mean seriously, we did. But the customers want differentiation, they want to buy different iron, different brands for different jobs. Why else do you think we can get ten times as much for our stuff than yours? Just having software identities won’t cut it. Look at NetApp. They really only got one product and there they are, stuck. Yeah, they’re bigger than the chorus line suppliers, the 3PARs, the Compellents, the Pillars whatever. But they’re not a star. They’re not EMC.

Give Warmenhoven credit, he tried to go our way by buying Data Domain, parading Slootman like a big country club trophy at his all hands meeting. A lotta good it did him once the Hopkinton dogs barked and showered dollars all over the floor. Now Slootman is mine and Dan? He’s off polishing his putter, flying his jet between golf courses, and out of it with Georgens running the show.

These guys are dancing to our tune and you’ve got no chance with Hyper-V. Gelsinger is a God-driven dynamo and you’ll find Donatelli is a fish out of the water. He’s maybe got one good product refresh in him and than that’s it. He’ll become another one of the worn-out has-been execs you inherited when you walked into HP.

No, Donatelli won’t cut it. Word is he’s already pissed off Roberson. Maybe I’ll have HR give Roberson a call, eh? Would you like that? We could give him CLARiiON or Celerra or something like that to play with.

Hey, that’s enough for now. I gotta look at the new candidate acquisition list. What; Pillar? Really? Okay, you got Workman’s number… No, better call Larry first.