HP's 'strained' relations with Violin: Vulture-on-the-windowsill account It has only been a few days since HP decided to curtail its reselling agreement with Violin Memory to concentrate on its own 3PAR product. Big-mouthed bankers also had plenty to say on the move as it pertained to a rumoured IPO by Violin. But El Reg has since heard a bit of inside information from various players close to the …
Is this news ? I thought it was common knowledge BCS were selling this but only in very specific niche environments, typically where it wouldn't be easy to go with traditional storage. It being only sold as part of a BCS led sale, so in reality there would be very little internal overlap.
HP is trying to sell Violin into my firm right now, a straight storage play, no BCS system required by us. Violin have aleady punted us a solution -- and predictably they ain't impressed with this intervention by their "partner". Whatever happens we'll pay less for a kick-ass solution, so long may the spat continue.
I agree. There was scepticism to begin with that the server guys were the only people selling a storage product, but the specificity of the target market (and the fact that barely any were sold) meant that it was a complete non-issue. Gary poached a couple of the good techies, but they've started to come back now.
I heard one big issue in the r'ship was that Violin encouraged HP to buy a load of the 3000 stock to help their numbers for the IPO, and then announced the 6000!
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Been hearing this out in the Channel now for a while. The only "major" deal one of their key UK channel partners has closed is indeed a deal that was gifted to the partner purely as fulfillment and paper pushing.
The internal Battle of BCS vs ESSN inside HP is also very similar to another internal political battle... of the "new" 3PAR boys vs the "old" StorageWorks/EVA boys, which is also rife at this time.
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Yes, in the sense that 3PAR has already won that battle (basically the day HP decided to pay $3.5 billion for a $200 million storage company) and EVA has been put out to pasture with the rest of DEC. XP/Hitachi rebrand is over as well. HP is only keeping XP around to give them more time to try to convince existing customers of the value of 3PAR. If I were at HDS, which I am not, I would be going into every XP account and trying to flip them to VSP knowing that HP is trying to flip them as well. It is fine if that is what HP wants to do, they should just be honest about it instead of telling people that XP will be around because they need the mainframe connectivity.... for both of those mainframe shops that use HP storage.
Actually it was $2.4 Billion and the XP situstion is no where near as cynical as you suggest, XP is still high margin business, especially around services, 3PAR provides higher margin on tin but requires fewer services. From a HP perspective XP is just another tool in the kit bag. Do you believe HDS haven't always done this anyway? The difference is HP now have more than a me too solution in 3PAR, as such HDS are having a hard time flipping customers.
Utter FUD - even recently HP was selling more Hitachi gear than HDS was. HDS are doing some very crazy things and still losing more than their fair share to HP!
EVA is clearly less of a focus for HP than it was but existing EVA customers can still invest in that platform or migrate VERY easily to 3PAR.
HP had a walk-on part in the Violin story, which they and others seem intent on bigging up.
Meanwhile, other anonymous commentators are way off the mark in crucial aspects... so much so that they can only be driven by agenda, rumour and wishful thinking, rather than facts or actual knowledge.
Says the AC :-) not sure there's any sour grapes involved at least from HP's side, with 3PAR they have an inhouse product with a more complete feature set so why not leverage that going forward. For joint Customers they'll receive the HP minimum 5 year support guarantee and Violin will continue to profit from upgrades and have the Customer details so can attempt to flip them at any point.
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