Software Olympics Ahoy!

At Hewlett-Packard, the Olympic Games take place every nine

months. The events here are intense. HP’s partners, selling its network

management software Openview (and Voice over IP product VoiceCall), fight it out

in the market against Computer Associates’ Unicenter and Jasmine and IBM’s

Tivoli to return a part of over $1 billion in revenues for Openview alone.

In the first Software Olympics 2001, HP gave away awards to

its partners at the idyllic tropical resort island of Kota Kinabalu (which is

also the capital of Sabah state and happens to be a major industrial hub) in

Malaysia recently. In the same breath, HP egged on its partners to come back

triumphant yet again nine months later to another Olympics awards ceremony.

HP is pushing its Software solutions organization (SSO) into

the big league. It wants to further grow its $ 2 billion software business. In

this endeavor, the first and foremost rival is CA, the mention of which makes

every HP executive grimace with determination.

Hosting the Software Olympics was the first big step HP took

in the APAC region (which includes Japan and Australia.) It is now energizing

its 200-strong direct marketing force, which will compliment its channel. One of

the immediate resolutions HP has made is to work more closely with HP

Consulting, one of the largest consulting businesses in the world which

attempted to grow into a monolith with an acquisition of PriceWaterhouseCooper (PwC),

but failed.

Channel is HP SSO’s primary driver in the market, asserts

Peter van der Fluit vice president, worldwide software sales and marketing, HP.

The company is assuring sales partners every assistance in winning a fierce

price war that is underway in the market. (The intensity of the price war can be

gauged by the fact that one of HP’s rivals dropped its final quote by almost

125 per cent from its original quote.)

"We are bullish about double digit growth in APAC,"

says HP SSO’s APAC marketing director, Jonathan Chiu. He brushes aside CA’s

threat and says if HP is facing any challenge, then it is from emerging

companies like US-based Microwise. And he doesn’t forget to add that though

Microwise kind of companies are present in the market they lack the kind of

product range HP touts and thus have restricted market access. HP SSO is betting

big on India and China. It announced a new software lab in India recently. It is

also planning to build developer communities in the two countries. A Sun-style

university programme is also in the pipeline.

In India, Sun is HP’s biggest ally. Interestingly, over 50

per cent of Openview installations are on Sun Solaris. "We are in initial

talks with Sun Micro in India to formalize a relationship which is mostly

unofficial today," says HP SSO’s country manager for India Amit

Chatterjee.

The message to its partners is simple: go and conquer the

market and we will be waiting for you with rewards. HP’s approach to the

emerging web services market interestingly resembles its peripherals business

model: there are definite products and services that bring in money in the short

term even as the company puts together a modular frame-work for web services to

rival SunOne and .Net.

Prashanth Hebbar in

Kota Kinabalu (Malaysia)/CNS