HP to focus on oil and gas to take on IBM

Hewlett-Packard, which in June this year launched its c-Class blade servers, is aggressively looking at tapping the Indian oil and gas market to challenge the supremacy of IBM in the server market in the country.

Blade servers allow IT managers to consolidate their huge racks of servers into smaller packages that are easier to manage and deploy.

The company which lags IBM in the server market in India, is ready with its new go-to market strategy. It's planning to focus on the oil and gas segment, where IBM is 'traditionally' very strong.

"The plan is to make sure that we get certification for oil and gas market, which we will have. We will tap the market which is a big market in countries like India, China , Malaysia and Indonesia. Then we will be very close to IBM, which is historically very strong in this segment," Tony Parkinson, vice president and general manager, Industry Standard Servers, Asia Pacific, HP, told Business Standard.

He said the company was working with the ISVs like Paradigm, PGS, Lindmark, Schlumberger and Western Gico, that give certification to the products eligible for oil and gas sector, to get certification for its c-Class blade and p-Class blade servers and expecting to get a breakthrough soon.

According to the IDC figures for the first quarter of the current fiscal, IBM is the market leader in all category of servers in India with a market share of 31 per cent, followed by HP with 26 per cent.

"In the second quarter, we have narrowed the gap and expect to continue this further for the forthcoming quarters, when we will start the bulk shipment of the recently launched new c-Class blade system solutions," Parkinson added.

He said in some countries like New Zealand, Australia , Thailand and Malaysia, HP is the leader in the servers market.

"We have about 60 per cent market share in New Zealand, 45 per cent in Australia and we are also leading in Thailand and Malaysia, where as in Europe we are number one in blade servers market and in North America, we are just a little bit behind of IBM," he added. The blade server market in India is growing quite faster.

According to IDC, while HP had sold just 85 units of its previous generation p-Class blade servers in the first quarter of 2005, in the corresponding quarter of the current fiscal, the company had sold 545 units.

"We expect that over the next two-three months we will be shipping large volumes of c-Class servers to the Indian market. We are talking to customers and organising a series of roadshows to demonstrate how this class of server can help them in about 40 per cent of cost savings," Parkinson added.

According to Parkinson, HP was looking at the consolidation market in India as the customers were changing their Unix servers into blade servers. He said excepting the Oil and Gas sector, the company is doing exceptionally well in other sectors.

"We are ahead of our competitors in telecom, BPOTES, manufacturing, entertainment, banking and finance and government sector," he claimed.