Re: a_yank_lurker
".....Both can sell an entire, branded package to a customer with complete end-to-end support. This is very similar to Apple....." Yeah, now where did I recall another closed-garden vendor that liked to pretend to be the enterprise Apple? Oh, that's it - Sun! And that's didn't exactly work out too well, did it? Oracle have since bought the Sun hardware carcass and closed-garden disease and are busily bricking themselves away in a corner.
".....supply a complete working system including hardware to the customer....." Or, sell a number of options for either parts or the whole system, with testing and support for the integrated whole based on best practices developed in the labs. For those that don't understand the IT market, there are very few true "green field" opportunities where a company is willing to either start from scratch or throw away all they have already invested in and start with a clean slate, which is what the all-in-one approach really requires to reach the scales to generate enough profits. More often than not, you will see lots of enterprises with mixed platforms and lots of individually-budgeted projects running on top of them. If you believe that cloud has (supposedly) created the abstract platform layer, it begs the question why would anyone buy Dell or CISCO's all-in-one offerings? They are more likely to want either edge solutions or tech to sit on-top-of the cloud. HP already know this because they tried it in the early Noughties with their original converged offering (the "pre-cloud cloud"), which (IIRC) had an underwhelming three enterprises willing to tear out everything in their datacenters to go with the new model. Instead, hp broke the converged offering into modules and concentrated on offering as many (often competing) solutions from as many vendors as possible, all neatly integrated and supported and managed by hp software. HP's willingness to jump in bed with anyone, even avowed competitors, made us joke it was the "all-in-whore" approach!
".....HPE seems to be going the route of a VAR when that may be a bad bet....." Pretty much what Sun claimed. To pretend there is no innovation in the hardware and software HP sells is to try and ignore such market successes as HP's complete domination of blades. Dell really does need to diversify, they're doing a better job of it than CISCO (who look very vulnerable seeing as they seem to be still predominantly reliant on over-priced networking kit), but HP already has, and HP has done it without alienating any of their partners. How long Dell can do the same with VMware in the same boat is going to be interesting to watch.
".....I would also expect their pricing to higher than Cisco and Dell when one steps back and looks at the entire picture..... Why? After all, costs reduce with scale, and the reason Mike Dell could afford to buy Dell is because they have been losing market share for years. CISCO have not managed to diversify out of networking and their share of the server and storage markets is miniscule. Please do explain why HP's approach will somehow make them more expensive than either?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
