HP's Denzel To Channel: Storage Key To HP's Future
crn.com
By Joseph F. Kovar, CRN
Storage will play an increasingly important role for Hewlett-Packard and its solution providers, said Nora Denzel, vice president and general manager of network storage solutions at the company, during the company's Lead With The Best conference, held here this week.
While HP does not publicly reveal storage revenue as a percentage of the total, it is so important to the company that President and CEO Carly Fiorina identified it as one of her top four initiatives when she took charge of the company two years ago, Denzel said.
"You know, at this time, especially with the malaise in the market, the best companies decide what they want to be when the market comes back," Denzel said. "We made huge decisions that we want to be very strategic [in] storage, services and software."
Even during tough times, clients' storage needs are doubling yearly as data needs and application requirements grow, Denzel said. "I also see behaviors such as CIOs deferring purchases, or deferring purchase requirements until they prioritize what their limited spending will be," she said. "But storage is always on the short list."
That growth represents a huge opportunity for solution providers, especially those that offer a value-add to clients, Denzel said. Customers are more concerned now than last year in understanding the returns they require from investments. "So I think it's a great opportunity for partners that actually can add value and plan with their customers vs. trying to just sell another megabyte and turn the crank on another box," she said.
Denzel called HP's proposed acquisition of storage software developer StorageApps a huge software play for HP because it gives the company storage virtualization technology.
Virtualization allows storage devices from multiple vendors to be managed as if they came from the same vendor, Denzel said. And once the acquisition is finalized, HP can use the technology immediately. "I think we can use it right from the get-go, in that it already works with our industry-leading RAID arrays, and it's a device that you can put in the middle of peoples' RAID arrays, either our XP or our VA 7100, or IBM, Hitachi, Sun, EMC."
Acquisitions such as that of StorageApps and the service arm of Comdisco, which is heavily involved in storage services, could be the first of many others, Denzel said. "You know, Carly has made it very clear that even during this economic downtime that storage, services, and software are key," Denzel said. "It would not be uncommon to see more acquisitions of storage, services and software [companies] as we retool and wait for the economy to come back." |
