NEW YORK, Jan 10 (Reuters) - Shares in Hewlett-Packard Co. closed slightly higher on Wednesday despite negative comments by a Merrill Lynch analyst regarding a key new line of HP computers that run the Unix operating system.
Earlier, shares of Hewlett-Packard, a component of the Dow Jones industrial average, were down. But by the close of trading on the the New York Stock Exchange, the company's shares ended up 3/16 to $31-3/4.
"We saw benchmarks for HP's new Superdome server," Merrill Lynch analyst Thomas Kraemer said, referring to tests that determine the performance of the machines. "The benchmarks for Superdome were tepid."
Hewlett-Packard, however, said the Superdome server was meeting its expectations.
Kraemer noted that HP has said the new Superdome server will be the catalyst to re-energize its Unix business.
He said the new servers fell short in terms of performance and price when compared with a key benchmark for Unix products from International Business Machines Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc. . HP, IBM and Sun Micro are vying for the business of moving corporate operations online.
"It did not beat the high-end servers that IBM introduced a year ago and it was more expensive than Sun Micro's on a price performance basis," Kraemer said. "As such, we do not think that this product will be a strong catalyst to produce a turn in HP's Unix business."
Hewlett-Packard manager Mark Hudson said he was surprised by Kraemer's comments.
"When we introduced the Superdome back in September, we talked about performance leadership," said Hudson, worldwide marketing manager of HP's 9000 business. "I'd say we are absolutely executing against that."
He added that the machine actually performs better than the IBM machine when judged under certain benchmarks, and that the system's abilities would improve over the life of the product. "Over the life of the Superdome system, we expect performance to grow by a factor of four," he said, adding that the life of the product was about three or four years.
He also said Merrill Lynch surveys had found that while there was a slowdown in information technology spending by corporations, spending on data storage products has remained steady.
Hudson said this would be a positive for HP, as well as data storage companies EMC Corp. , McData Corp. and Brocade Communications Systems Inc.
From the NTAP thread.
Jack |
