No surprises in HP's product road map

PALO ALTO - Hewlett-Packard's message to customers when the acquisition of Compaq closed last week was that there will be no big surprises among the products that it keeps and those that it kills.

Of course, that doesn't mean all customers will be happy with those decisions.

Company officials last week outlined product road maps for four newly formed divisions that will make up the new HP: Enterprise Systems Group, Imaging and Printing, HP Services, and Personal Systems.

The Enterprise Systems Group is split into two divisions: Business Critical Systems handles Unix hardware, software and operating systems; and the Industry Standard Server Group covers Intel-based servers, Windows, Linux and management software.

HP's product road map for servers, operating systems and software varies little from what users and analysts had first predicted when the deal was announced last September. HP Servers, with the exception of the Celeron-based tc2100 and 2210, will be phased out by the end of October. The tc6100 and 7100, introduced last month, will never ship, analysts say. The company will migrate three hardware and three operating-system platforms to the 64-bit Intel Itanium processor over the next few years, combine HP high-end XP Series storage with Compaq's midrange StorageWorks hardware and SANworks and VersaStor software.

"This acquisition has done wonders for the management and system strategies the two companies had separately," says Jamie Gruener, an analyst with The Yankee Group. "They really have broadened out the product line to the point that they now have a compelling offering against IBM and EMC."

But users and analysts question the wisdom of putting all future innovation on the Itanium hardware platform.

"The challenge I see for HP is they are putting a lot of eggs in the Itanium basket," Gruener says. "My worry is whether HP has a contingency plan if Itanium doesn't work out."

Bill Todd, an independent computer consultant in Strafford, N.H., says he wouldn't trust a single platform either, especially one that has been delayed so long.

"McKinley [Intel's next version of Itanium] is so late that no performance figures for it are yet publicly available," Todd says. "When [performance figures are available], expectations are that they will significantly lag [behind] IBM's Power4, which is shipping today, the Alpha EV7 and AMD's Hammer processor."

Systems administrators who have relied on OpenVMS on VAXs or scalable processor architecture-based AlphaServers are perhaps the unhappiest HP users. They say because HP hasn't settled on Alpha as a future platform, the company only has two alternatives - either AMD's Hammer processor or an Intel development project dubbed Yamhill that extends 64-bit capability to the X86 architecture.

"For new OpenVMS customers this road map has a 'Do Not Enter-Road Closed Indefinitely' sign at the first step," says Jeffrey Chimene, president of Systasis Computer Systems in Tucson, Ariz.

AlphaServers will continue to be developed through the EV7 and EV79 version processors as Compaq previously promised, but they will be phased out in 2005. OpenVMS will be ported to Itanium by as early as this summer, sources say.