As some of you might have noticed, I spend my last week in Istanbul (Turkey) for the “HP Enterprise Technology and Solutions Summit”. The annual link between HP and its partners. As there were several sessions under NDA you will not find all sessions written out here but I’ll try to give a brief summary of my personal comments.
The humble mastodon:
A first personal comment is that I have never heard an HP as humble as last week. Let me give you some examples:
* “We know we have been giving training today for yesterday’s technology and we apologize for that.” – WAAW!
* Trougout this week almost all speakers had the same vision when it comes to competition: “never get into a head-to-head comparison but try to focus on the strengths of your product. You never know if the competition changes features tomorrow.”
* 2 important statements to follow: “there’s no one size fits all” – “there is no product that is the sum of all perfect features“
The monolithic HP:
HP is a monolithic company selling modular solutions. It’s a bit a bold statement but I’ll try to explain; I have been surrounded by 800 people fulltime involved in ICT for 4days and not once I heard TWITTER being mentioned. Not one speaker started his session with; “hello, blabla is my name and you can follow me @blabla”.
And if the speakers don’t mention twitter, why wouldn’t the attendants do? Therefore I started the #ETSS and #HPETSS hash tags to try and find some ‘colleagues’. NOT ONE for a whole week!!! And when I tried to add the word twitter to the conversation, I was called the geek…
So isn’t HP out there? Yes they are. I follow several HP Twitter accounts but they do not have a person behind it. They are advertising/marketing accounts.
There are exceptions … @HPStorageGuy (Calvin Zito) and recently @HPsisyphus (f.k.a. @3ParFarley) (Mark Farley) who both do a hell of a job out there in the social world. When I mentioned these two, there were called ‘the Mavericks” of the company. I can assure u that is a compliment!
3PAR – the expensive daughter?
When HP and DELL had their acquisition war over 3PAR 2 months ago, the majority thought HP outbidded DELL just to ‘show off’ they are still the bigger brother. I was convinced there was more about it before this week but still needed some further arguments. And arguments I got! Not only is the 3PAR solution what it promises to be, HP takes it to the next level! HP already invested the same budget in R&D for 3PAR then id could for itself for the last 10 year. Definitely a story to follow up (already working on the first bid!).
My special thanks go to the entire 3PAR team (Fred, Sjoerd, Lee & Christophe) for the perfect technical sessions and the beers ath the bar and not to forget Jim Haberkorn for a nice chat at the Dataprotector reception.