HP stumbled mightily in 2011, and it had nothing to do with product or people. Even sales remained strong, though the PC business is changing. HP’s mighty stumble was a crisis of confidence due to a chain of shenanigans at the very top. This culminated with the short reign of Léo Apotheker, leaving HP to reassure the market of its strategy.
IBRIX
Meet the Enterprise IT Superpowers
After years spent focusing on personal technology, businesses are increasingly turning back to the enterprise. The corporate IT market is much more dynamic and competitive, with a few very large “superpower” companies discovering their power to drive purchasing decisions. If a supplier can create an integrated “stack” of hardware and software, they can push product purchases that might otherwise be overlooked or postponed. This is the main reason that enterprise IT acquisitions work so well: Where a small company must fight to sell their product, a large one can hitch it to a much more strategic sale and have it pulled along.
Podcast 8: Symantec Application HA, VirtualStore, and NetBackup 7
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 25:03 — 11.5MB)
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This week’s Tech Field Day roundtable discussion is an audio chat on the subject of Symantec’s VMworld-related announcements. This discussion occurred prior to the official announcement of these three products and was part of our joint effort to support VMworld, including Symantec’s sponsorship of our “Get Away to VMworld” contest.
Dell + EqualLogic, Exanet, Ocarina, 3Par = What?
The storage industry got a lot more competitive this morning, as Dell announced plans to buy 3Par. This is the latest round in a well-established race for the enterprise storage dollar, challenging superpower (and Dell partner) EMC in the high-end SAN space. What does this acquisition say about the industry as a whole? Where are we headed?
Podcast 5: HP Roundtable at Tech Field Day
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 20:26 — 235.8MB)
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This week’s Tech Field Day roundtable discussion focuses on the presentation given by HP at our Boston event. This presentation included a strategic overview from Tom Joyce, HP’s new VP of StorageWorks Marketing, Milan Shetti Sr., Director of NAS Engineering, as well as an introduction to the X9000 NAS (former IBRIX) product from Patrick Osborne, NAS Business Development Manager.
Panasas, Parascale Shuffle CEOs For Growth
The CEO Shuffle is in full force in the IT infrastructure industry. Geoff Barrall, founder and CEO of Data Robotics, recently stepped aside for Tom Buiocchi, and Alex Bakman of VKernel shifted to CTO, bringing in Doug McNary. Now Panasas and ParaScale are replacing their CEOs with industry veterans. The message is clear: The economy is improving, and investors want their portfolio companies to begin growing again.
Tech Field Day Boston: The Links
As usual, the Tech Field Day event received massive amounts of attention, generating thousands of tweets and dozens of blog posts and videos from delegates and bystanders alike. We will attempt to collect those links here for reference and review.
The Stack Wars Have Begun!
Just as public cloud computing is beginning to catch on, the enterprise data center world has been shaken up by the biggest IT product vendors. Rather than sit back and watch their wares commoditized, companies like Cisco, EMC, HP, and now HDS are stepping up to the plate with integrated “stacks” that include server, storage, networking, and management software. The next-layer players, VMware and Microsoft in particular, are joining hands, too, eager to support these stacks. To paraphrase the wise Jedi master, Yoda, “cloudy, the future is.” So, the stack wars have begun!
HP StorageWorks Tech Day: Day 1
What an interesting and extremely busy day the first day of the HP StorageWorks Tech Day 2010 proved to be. The day was a mixture of vision and product demos, providing both the high level and detailed view of current technology and future plans.
Dell Scoops Up Exanet After All
Dell picked up clustered NAS pro Exanet, finally signing the dotted line after months of speculation. The US $12 million purchase follows reports that the company was going into receivership in December after failing to repay a US $10 million loan from Kreos Capital.