Hewlett-Packard this week cut the price of some of its Unix servers by up to 20% in an effort to grab market share from IBM and Sun Microsystems.
The price cuts apply to the rp7405 and rp7410 eight-way servers and the rp8400 16-way server, said Dimitris Dovas, worldwide product line manager for the company's midrange Unix servers. These servers compete with Sun's v880, 3800, 4800, and 6800 servers, as well as IBM's p650 and p670 servers, said Dovas.
IDC's latest server report gives HP a 40% market share in the Unix space, a figure that has grown since last year, Dovas said. "Competitors ... are losing share, so we are doing a proactive cut to increase our share," he said. "We want to move even more aggressively. The competition in the midrange Unix market is very aggressive, even though the market is flat. So the only way for HP to grow here is to take share from the competition."
The driver for the price cuts is improved supply-chain efficiencies that have resulted in CPU price cuts of 5% to 2% , and in cuts in memory prices of 20% to 22%, said Dovas.
In order to improve customers' total cost of ownership, HP has also cut the maintenance cost for these servers by 15%, Dovas said.
News source: InformationWeek - HP Readies 20% Unix Server Price Cuts
The price cuts apply to the rp7405 and rp7410 eight-way servers and the rp8400 16-way server, said Dimitris Dovas, worldwide product line manager for the company's midrange Unix servers. These servers compete with Sun's v880, 3800, 4800, and 6800 servers, as well as IBM's p650 and p670 servers, said Dovas.
IDC's latest server report gives HP a 40% market share in the Unix space, a figure that has grown since last year, Dovas said. "Competitors ... are losing share, so we are doing a proactive cut to increase our share," he said. "We want to move even more aggressively. The competition in the midrange Unix market is very aggressive, even though the market is flat. So the only way for HP to grow here is to take share from the competition."
The driver for the price cuts is improved supply-chain efficiencies that have resulted in CPU price cuts of 5% to 2% , and in cuts in memory prices of 20% to 22%, said Dovas.
In order to improve customers' total cost of ownership, HP has also cut the maintenance cost for these servers by 15%, Dovas said.
News source: InformationWeek - HP Readies 20% Unix Server Price Cuts
The company is also introducing a new service to provide custom partitioning, component, and load configuration services free of charge, resulting in the delivery of a fully customized server within five days of the order, he said. The customization service is available through HP's solution provider channels.
The Unix servers are also getting an improved capacity-on-demand program. HP's iCOD program now allows the installation of extra memory and cell boards for which customers are not charged until they are turned on, Dovas said. iCOD previously covered only the processors, he said.
There is no premium to the price of the server to have iCOD capability, and no configuration restrictions, said Dovas. "Competitors prefer to have restrictions because capacity on demand programs means deferred revenue."
Once turned on, customers are charged for 30 days of use for the components under iCOD, after which they can be turned off if needed to reduce costs, Dovas said.
This story appears courtesy of CRN, the newspaper for builders of technology solutions.
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