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