HP StorageWorks to 'refresh' storage portfolio

R Jai Krishna

New Delhi

July 24th, 2007

HP StorageWorks believes in 'refreshing' existing storage products portfolio
and make it more affordable rather than introducing new products. The company is
banking on its partners for demystifying storage management. Jim Wagstaff, VP,
StorageWorks division, Storage and Servers Technology Solutions Group,
Hewlett-Packard Asia Pacific and Japan region, disclosed this to CyberMedia
News.

"We plan to refresh our existing storage product portfolio every 18 to
24 months. Refreshing existing technologies makes sense, unless there is a
technology revolution, which necessitates a new product/ solution. This is also
because the R&D for new products takes a larger time," he said.

Wagstaff said that the technology solutions group, which offers enterprise
solutions under the brand name -- StorageWorks -- sees bigger opportunities in
the storage side by expanding the customer reach. "As part of our global
strategy there will be more additions to our existing XP line of products,
especially in the XP 2400 data center series. We will also be refreshing we will
be adding more the mid-range EVA line. At any given point of time we will be
introducing ten products, which have been 'refreshed' and it will be the most
extensive ones. We 'refresh' the product portfolio so that the foundation
remains the same, and if the client wants new capacity addition, they will be
able to do so, without any hassles. The price variations for the 'refreshed'
products will also be very minimal," Wagstaff said.

HP is betting big on the storage products and solutions given the increase in
storage requirements, which is only likely to increase manifold in the coming
years. It has acquired three companies, which specialize in storage solutions.
The first one is APPIQ the second is Outer Bay, which is into storage archiving.
The third company is Polyserve, which works on clustered gateway technology.

HP believes blades would drive the future revenue stream for its storage
portfolio. "There is a huge acceptance for blade storage, and combined with
tape storage, we will be able to bring in new architecture for storages,"
he said. "Enterprise solutions is an area of growth for us, both internally
and externally, with the new architecture of stack integration and backward
compatibility. For this we will be leveraging on our partner network for driving
this initiative and to demystify storage management in the market,"
Wagstaff said.

HP will be concentrating on the partners, who are already into high-end and
mid-range servers for taking the high-end storage technologies such as the EVAs
and XPs to the market. "We will not have partners exclusively for storage.
Instead we are looking at partners who have a good presence in tier-2 and tier-3
cities with a large pre-sales force. These partners will be handling small
businesses and a few large accounts, and we will enable them to cater customers
with the entire portfolio," he said.

The company will be concentrating on three key things to drive the
StorageWorks product portfolio. The first one will be to increase the level of
investment in terms of training and demo-kits for the partners. Reduce costs and
business risk of the partners by helping them to solve problems and approach
opportunities. "We will also help customers to grow in cost-efficient
manner, when it comes to data storage and management. 'Green IT' will be a part
of the initiative," he added.

To drive more velocity in the business, HP would be concentrating on
commercial, enterprises and SMB segments. "SMBs are the ones which energize
our business, and they are the future engine of growth," he added.

(CyberMedia News)