Global CIO: IBM Claims Hardware Supremacy And Calls Out HP's HurdGlobal CIO: IBM Claims Hardware Supremacy And Calls Out HP's Hurd

Hewlett-Packard Asked to comment on an assertion made by HP CEO Mark Hurd a few months ago that IBM's a role player in the hardware space because it wants to be able to "pick and choose" which parts of the hardware stack to compete in, Adkins said, "That's an interesting comment he would make, but let me try it this way: Mark Hurd is moving to all x86. We have System x, which is x86, and we have offerings that compete head to head with anything he has in his portoflio. And I can be bullish and bold, but the market is speaking for itself. . . . So we have momentum and we can compare head to head with HP and Mark Hurd. Where we distinguish ourselves is we do more than x86, with things like workload optimization, and we have mainframes, and we have Unix systems based on our Power architecture. So when you start to look at what we have and compare it with his portfolio, I struggle with his conclusion in terms of do we actually have holes in our product line."

And then came the roundhouse comment, which IBM also included in more detail in its press release about Hurd's and HP's approach to the enterprise hardware business: "He [Hurd] talks about taking commodity parts and having supply chains to deliver them, but everyone's going to have to do that. What will make leaders stand above all others is not just running a traditional PC game but instead it's the innovation you wrap around those parts that attacks some of the pain points enterprises are seeing and their need for lower costs and better management and automation and integration and predictive analytics to take their business in a new direction. So I like our lineup compared to HP's lineup."

Dell "If I may, Dell in my opinion doesn't really have heavy-duty R&D—their strategy is consistent with how the industry's been doing PCs for the past 30 years. If you look at Dell's model, that's what they do. If you look at R&D innovations, it's hard to put Dell in that category." And without that extensive end-to-end approach to optimized innovations, Adkins says, Dell won't be able to compete at the higher ends of the enterprise business.

Oracle-Sun "For Oracle to acquire Sun, that was an interesting event for our industry, but you don't get optimized systems just by making an acquisition," said Adkins, noting that IBM's Power7 development spanned "semiconductor physics up to middleware considerations" during a "3-year journey" on which IBM invested $3.2 billion. "Oracle has recongnized, based on patterns and customer needs, that this is something they'd like to participate in. But when Larry talks about Oracle and Sun hardware today, what he has is a bag of parts—and it's gonna require real work over time and lot of enginneering to deliver on that."

Cisco "The difference there is this not one of these straetegies where you can just decide to go into a space," Adkins said. "What we're doing is grounded over years of R&D around how we build and optimize the stack to deliver increased performance. Cisco actually has a point of view for how to extend beyond core their competence of switches and networking and extend into server space, but they're gonna need more than that: when you think about complete systems that customers will be looking for, a lot of it is how you integrate the attributes of the MW, and how do you better tune applications and workflow across the systems stack, and that's where I think we are uniquely positioned beyond Cisco and HP."

So yes indeed—IBM's not only got a reinvigorated line of products, it's also got a more-aggressive posture toward telling its story and, more important, articulating what it believes are the keys to strategic IT value in the challenging next couple of years for CIOs. And by taking such an aggressive stance, IBM is forcing competitors to either step up their games, or to debunk the IBM story as shallow and hollow.

But to debunk that story, HP and Dell and Oracle-Sun and Cisco are going to have to shoot down the experiences of CIOs like David Guzman—who for two straight years was CIO of the #1 company on the information 500 list of most-innovative corporate users of technology—who's an early and ardent fan of eX5. With clients including seven of the top 10 retail banks and nine of the world's top 10 auto makers, Acxiom's global interactive marketing operations require huge and rapidly growing data analysis: from 4 petabytes a year ago to 10 petabyes today, churned through 22,500 servers. And here's what Guzman had to say about IBM's new lineup in the IBM press release:

"The IBM eX5 systems are game changers," says Acxiom CIO David Guzman. "We've been able to double our virtualization capacity, dropping our software licensing costs. The price/performance equation is extraordinarily compelling, with five times the performance at a fraction of the cost. Moreover, there is a positive impact on all of the other key components of IT cost—space, power, labor, maintenance. The concrete results of this next generation machine are exciting, and the roadmap has 'knock-your-socks-off' vision."

So better hold on to your socks—the hardware business is getting a whole lot more interesting.

RECOMMENDED READING: Global CIO: Hewlett-Packard CEO Hurd's Strategy: The Infrastructure Company Global CIO: IBM CEO Sam Palmisano Talks With Global CIO Global CIO: Oracle Needs More Than Ellison's Talk To Beat IBM's Systems Global CIO: IBM Calls Out Oracle's Ellison On Database Claims Global CIO: Hewlett-Packard's Hurd Creates Growth Engine In R&D Global CIO: Oracle's Ellison Challenges IBM, NetApp, And—Well—Everyone Global CIO: Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's Top 10 Reasons For Buying Sun Global CIO: IBM CEO Palmisano Challenges IT Industry Via Smarter Planet 2 Global CIO: Hewlett-Packard Recruits Microsoft To Raid Sun's Customers Bob Evans is senior VP and director of information's Global CIO unit.

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