In the last couple of newsletters we looked at how Cisco and Oracle are positioning themselves to be at the center of what they believe to be the integrated approach to how enterprise IT is provided in the future. In this newsletter we will look at HP.
Until recently HP was not trying to position itself to be at the center of how enterprise IT is provided in the future. They were, for example, quite content to basically ignore their own networking products and sell Cisco products. However, as discussed in a recent newsletter, when Cisco announced its UCS initiative HP began to take a different stance relative to Cisco. They now are aggressively competing with Cisco in the networking space in general.
For example, their somewhat recent acquisition of 3Com indicates that they are trying to compete head to head with Cisco in the data center LAN market. HP would seem to be in an advantageous position. They have a strong story to tell in storage, servers, networking, management and professional services. The strange thing about HP however, is that they have a history of not pulling together their disparate business units into a coherent, integrated solution. So, if their strategy is to be at the center of what they believe to be the integrated approach to how IT is provided in the future, they have to change their culture.
This brings to mind the cliché that “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”. The bottom line is that while changing the culture of a corporate is certainly possible, it is not easy.
If we handicap the players we have looked at so far, Cisco’s strategy seems to be predicated in part on its ability to partner with some key industry players such as EMC. It is also predicated on those partners not being acquired, unless of course, they are acquired by Cisco. Oracle’s strategy is predicated, at least for now, on its ability to acquire and assimilate multiple companies, at least one of which is quite large unto itself. Partnering is difficult, but so is assimilating acquisitions.
HP controls the pieces to allow themselves to be a key provider of the integrated IT solutions of the future. All it has to do is to turn around the culture of a company of 300,000 employees while making its financial goals every quarter.
In the next newsletter we will look at IBM and Dell. In the mean time, we would like your input. Do you believe that the future of IT is based on tightly integrating networking, servers, storage and possibly? If so, when do you think that future will be mainstream?
