* What HP's acquisition of AppIQ means to the industry
Last Monday, HP announced its acquisition of AppIQ, the Burlington, Mass., start-up that has played a major role in building the SMI specification into an industry standard. Today we’ll look at what the fallout from this purchase is likely to be.
AppIQ produces an SMI-based tool kit that hardware vendors use to interface with management software so that managers can discover their products. AppIQ also builds a management product called StorageAuthority, a storage resource management (SRM) package that is rebadged by HDS, HP and Sun. StorageAuthority is built from the ground up on SMI-S, and the SNIA’s last published test results show that StorageAuthority is a technology leader.
HP is moving away from its home-grown proprietary tools in favor of standards-based ones: the company uses StorageAuthority as the SRM piece of its Storage Essentials software, the storage management component of HP’s standards-based Systems Insight Manager. This move certainly provides significant added value to HP’s intellectual property portfolio, and makes it the industry leader in standards-based storage management.
This move makes a lot of sense for HP and helps to bring a lot of very useful SRM knowledge into the company. But does this put competitors at a disadvantage? Probably not.
It is unlikely that HP would try to bring pressure to bear on HDS and Sun, taking advantage of the fact that these two competitors now rely on HP-AppIQ for a significant piece of their SRM solutions. To understand this, it is necessary to be mindful of the fact that the sole value of SMI-S is that it is a standard extending across the industry. In other words, it provides value by providing a common playing field to all vendors. Were HP to withhold any aspect of the SMI-S tools it develops, much of the value of its investment would suffer.
HDS, HP and Sun will still differentiate themselves from one another through the non-SMI parts of their SRM solutions, and through the proprietary management capabilities that they will keep in-house. This, of course, is exactly what EMC and IBM are already doing with their SMI-based offerings.
Actually, a parallel to this relationship already exists and, curiously enough, with the same companies. Both HP and Sun buy their high-end storage arrays from HDS, and have been doing so for years. It is a good example of what has been termed “co-opetition,” where competitors sometimes find it is in everyone’s best interest to become allies even while they compete.
Because of this, while Sun certainly won’t like the idea of contributing to HP’s income, it is most unlikely that it would walk away HP. And of course, don’t expect HP to walk away from a revenue stream.
Still, it must be said that with this acquisition HP at once has stolen a march on its competitors and at the same time made a public statement about the importance of standards-based management to its strategy.
Feel free to disagree with me, of course. I try to respond promptly to all e-mail that is sent my way.
