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What is HPs Sun Complete Care program all about?
The program was launched earlier this year. HP has been planning to replace Sun servers and have been successful in doing that. We build a lot of expertise in terms of Solaris to HP racks migration and Solaris to Solaris XDV6 migration. HP is a certified service partner for Solaris and Sun cluster environment. But after Suns acquisition, their customers started to accelerate migration projects. The key business drivers for that were to reduce costs in infrastructure, increase power efficiency, performance, and reduce maintenance costs.

What are the key factors that are driving mainframe customers to migrate from the legacy systems?
The overall TCO, maintenance, and software costs are growing higher. These are the key factors that are pushing customers to shift from their legacy systems. The other criteria where customers are looking to move out from the legacy systems from an Indian perspective is the role of two major dynamics that are relevant while selecting a server or an infrastructure. In terms of TCO, customers were looking for acquisition and maintenance costs. But today people are also looking at the footprint of the software and also the power and cooling capacity. When these two dynamics come into play, the costs for these are substantially higher than the acquisition costs. That is where migration from legacy to new generation platforms is taking place.

Has recession impacted the non-x86 server businesses?
According to IDC data, there is a slight decline in both x86 and non x86 server businesses due to the recession. The x86 is in about $28 bn while the non-x86 market, which are EPIC risk and mainframes, is about $26.5 bn. In India also there has been a slight decline in terms of investments for both x86 and non-x86 markets, but the critical projects and critical decisions are still going on. We see a strength in critical projects where customers are making decisions faster, since they feel that if they can complete the project during the recession they will get a better cost structure. We also see the HPFS model as a tool to survive in the downturn.

But HP is still leading in the non-x86 segment?
We are leading in the EPIC risk segment based on the Q1 and Q2 data in APJ. In the high-end category, we had a market leadership of 65% in FY 08. We continue to dominate the high-end category because we have certain features in our operating systems which is conducive to the environment for best practices. Clustering is our heritage, right from open VMS clusters, to DMX clusters to LVRs.

Suraj PC
surajp@cybermedia.co.in

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