Fatter margins, simpler servers

ts integrated infrastructure portfolio is the Blade System Matrix, hardware in a rack; VirtualSystem, a Blade System Matrix with one of the three major virtualisation engines installed; CloudSystem Matrix, pret-a-porter management software and portals and the App System that adds applications. The first AppSystems is for SAP and SQL databases.

Nielsen says it’s “not a big stretch” for resellers who don’t have to spend more in training.

“If you look at the VirtualSystem, it’s a repackaging of what our resellers are talking to customers today,” Nielsen says. “Resellers are already talking about converged infrastructure but now they are packaging in the virtualised engine as well.”

“All we are doing is make it much easier to configure it correctly and getting it up and running in the customer environment quickly.”

But that doesn’t mean that any reseller can sell VirtualSystem: “I think the skills are there within our resellers today to go out there and have an intelligent conversation with our customers today”.

“Now it is easier for them to talk about the whole solution, and it’s more difficult to get the solution wrong (because integrated systems are preconfigured). This just helps them configure those solutions more quickly.”

HP also sells appliances akin to mainframes, the latest of which is the E5000 messaging system for Microsoft Exchange suitable for organisations with 500 to 15,000 seats that starts at $30,000. “It’s not an expensive solution by any stretch of the imagination,” Nielsen says.

Its timing coincides with the deployment of Exchange 2010; Microsoft says two-thirds of users with Exchange have the eight-year-old version and that 78 million mailboxes will shift across in the next two years.

Spinning servers from networks

For a networking company, Cisco quickly sold a lot of servers. Analyst IDC’s Asia-Pacific x86 processor server tracker said that by May, Cisco’s UCS (Unified Computing System) had a 12 percent share of Australian and New Zealand blade servers for third place after about a year  on sale. And Cisco claims third position in global x86 blade server factory revenue, a slightly more obscure statistic.