HP: we had portfolio gaps in entry level servers

HP GPC 2015 A competitive bite is something HP has confessed to lacking in the small biz server arena of late but has coughed a couple of entry level boxes, and is tweaking the channel’s financial plumbing.

The two ProLiant tower servers, the ML10 v2 and ML110 are priced at $300 and $1000 respectively, with the first aimed at very small companies with up to 25 seats and the latter at those with 50 seats.

“Both products allow us to compete more effectively than we have for the SMB customer at the entry-level space,” said Peter Schrady, HP veep and GM of rack and tower servers.

He said in 2011 with the advent of Gen8, the company had to make “some decisions based on pure R&D numbers so we consolidated the portfolio and left some gaps”.

“We haven’t done a great job in the channel of attacking that [SMB] space and prioritising solutions for those customers, now we are.”

It has not escaped HP’s attention that Lenovo, which swiped the PC crown from its head several years back, has aggressively gone after the sub$300 1P tower segment with relatively low-priced gear.

“It appears they have been buying share,” claimed Schrady.

The boxes are based on Intel’s E5 Xeon, can handle virtualised workloads, and come with more memory, more cores and the HP BIOS.

“We’ve got the big boy package for the small business customer,” he said, without a hint of a snigger.

Resellers aren’t going to get rich quick selling the SMB towers - at least not unless they bag orders from tons of small businesses - but HP said they can up-sell installation services and extended warranty.

HP’s transacts 70 per cent of its revenues via the channel but admitted it needs to make its sales programmes “simpler”, and improve deal registration to free up discounts more quickly. ®