DQ Top 20:#5 Hewlett-Packard India

HP in India says that FY2014 was one of the best years it has had in the last few years. This might be surprising for the critics but the company's transition and reorganizations in the last couple of years seems to be have connected well with the customers here in India.

In FY13, HP globally spoke about a new style of IT-meaning the confluence of technologies like mobile, analytics, social, cloud, and big data. And in FY14, the emphasis clearly was on translating this agenda into business opportunities.

As we look at its performance closely in India, H1 FY14 saw impressive gains and it closed on big transformational deals that added a good business momentum. But by Q4 FY14, things started slowing down, and this was mainly due to the pre-election silent period in the market. Overall, by March 2014, the company closed the year on a healthy note and the growth it posted indeed looks impressive as despite that the year was mired in issues like political instability to policy paralysis at the government level leading to a gloomy economy.

As we look at the significant highlights over the year, the laptop deal with the UP government during FY13 has given HP the muscle to address such large scale government order and has given the ability understand such large projects and this helped it to aggressively foray on to the education vertical in FY14 with many unique offerings that saw good mandates.

On the enterprise side, it was the large transformational and IT modernization projects that helped HP during the year. FY14 also saw the beginning of the end of traditional IT rooted to conventions. IT organizations are forced to adopt an hybrid IT set up factoring in the changed dynamics like big data to analytics to mobile to social. This acted as the sweet spot for HP. Whether it be hardware or software or service, HP banked on its huge portfolio and was able to respond pro-actively to hybrid IT needs. If one has to define hybrid IT, it is the co-existence of traditional IT complemented with the new style of IT and in the bargain it creates an agile eco-system that is in sync with the current trends.

As we look at the company's Enterprise Group (EG) dynamics over the year, it clearly had a terrific momentum on its Industry Standard Servers (ISS). HP's x86 server market share is estimated to be around 35% as of last quarter. Over the year its Moonshot servers range created a new category in the server segment that was able to offer the right kind of computing power for select verticals like e-Commerce companies and others. These are not powerful servers per se as they use ARM and Intel Atom chips- what is been used in smartphones of today. These servers reduced power consumption by 89%, occupied tiny floor space and churned out decent computing. This was a big success for HP, both in India and globally. High Performance Computing (HPC) is another area that saw good acceleration for HP over the year. Meanwhile its 3PAR storage portfolio also saw very good growth in FY14.

But on the down side, its Business Critical Systems (BCS), continues to bleed, akin to what's happening globally as UNIX shades out by the day. But HP says, it still has good mandates on UNIX and it will continue to serve its customers even though the market and volumes going south.
On the enterprise side it had good wins and signed on deals like the one with Visa processor VFS Global to transform its IT and infrastructure and take it to a hybrid model.