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HP Discover: Preview & Where to for HP from here?

May 28th, 2015 No comments

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I’ll be heading to HP Discover in Last Vegas next week to find out about all things HP.

Where to from here?

It’s no secret HP is having a terrible time at the moment. They are in the middle of a very expensive, very distracting, very time consuming split into two new companies, HP Inc and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Will two separate companies make any difference to HP? They just reported their worst revenue since 2007. They are spending as much of this declining revenue on Capex as stock buy-backs to prop up the share price. This means they are spending even less money to be able to create future money.

All big IT companies have been transitioning themselves away from tin sellers to service companies, well HP Enterprise Services has been told to find another $2 billion in savings in 3 years. That’s because in the last quarter they had a 16% drop in turnover. Are they going to continue to cut costs so drastically that there isn’t anything left to build on?  They just can’t seem to compete with the cloud.

Storage which is one of the shining product portfolios has seen its revenues head down by 8.4%. Luckily for them they are still not doing as badly as NetApp but that’s only very very slight consolation. Storage buying is changing, it’s moving to converged, hyper-converged and cloud. Storage is becoming more of a server thing so I wonder how HP is going to show its figures when external storage and internal storage just become two options delivery mechanisms for the same thing.

HP still make very very good enterprise hardware, reliable servers, fast storage but this matters less and less when workloads are moving to the cloud. EMC just bought Virtustream for $1.2B to further build out its Hybrid Cloud offering. HP has made similar investment and a lot of noise about its HP Helion public OpenStack based cloud but this doesn’t seem to be translating into sales or a strategy that enterprises can buy into for the long run.

HP says it is not competing against AWS, in my opinion that’s just admiting you are not in the cloud business. You may as well change your company name to HP Legacy.

Lots of uncertainly about HP, can they turn this sentiment around?

Discover Preview

Back to HP Discover, HP has the world watching, what are they going to say?

Software Read more…

Categories: HP, HP Discover Tags: ,

SpiceWorld presentation: vSphere 6, Big, Better, Should You Be Bovvered?

May 13th, 2015 No comments

SpiceWorld_LogoI have just had the pleasure of presenting at SpiceWorld, the conference for IT Pros put on by SpiceWorks. SpiceWorks provide software for managing your IT environment and is targeted mainly at SMBs. The software is free to use and is funded with advertising and other hook-ins from vendors so you can for example inventory your PCs and then link to HP to get warranty information or purchase more RAM. They also run a very good community forum for IT Pros to help each other with any of their issues or get recommendations on how to manage their environment.
Back to the conference, plenty of sessions on the SpiceWorks software itself but also many other sessions on other technology that IT pros use on a daily basis as well as some cool presentations on the TOR Network, Malware and the Enigma Machine.

I was asked to talk about vSphere and so of course presented on the new vSphere 6.

I went through some of the editions particularly looking at what would be interesting for SMBs, highlighting the free ESXi version to be able to get started with virtualisation for free. I went through some of the new features, everywhere vMotion, SMT-FT, Enhanced Linked Mode, new stuff with vCenter, the PSC, the VCSA and then spent some more time on Virtual Volumes, then onto install and upgrades.

The session was recorded, I will post the recording when it is available, here are the slides.

Categories: ESX, Update Manager, vCenter, VMware Tags: