Latchford
What do you think are the three biggest challenges facing Australian SMBs today?
Bovis
It’s actually diffi cult to say what SMBs’ biggest challenges are at the moment, simply because any challenge, if handled right, stops being a challenge and turns into a competitive advantage for any business.
This said there are three major areas we see as clear areas of concern—enhancing data security, improving Internet or networking bandwidth/connection speed and data backup and disaster recovery.
Bovis
What technology limitations are preventing IT vendors from providing commonality of products across their server platforms?
Latchford
IBM does not accept the proposition that there are limitations preventing commonality. Clients select business applications which drive the selection of a particular server platform. IBM provides our clients with a choice of servers which provide a range of operating systems, scalability and performance. All of the IBM server platforms support Linux, and all can be managed from a single point of control with IBM Director, while each also supports a distinct set of operating systems that provide functions and ISV support which differentiate them.
Latchford
How does HP respond to suggestions that it is lagging in storage virtualisation?
Bovis
We have not seen a need or demand from our SMB customers desiring heterogeneous storage virtualisation solutions and would be surprised to learn that IBM has any SMB storage virtualisation customers in the Australia.
In the context of SMBs, virtualisation is not a technology trend on their top-10 list of IT “must-haves”—they are more interested in ensuring that they are implementing data backup and disaster recovery solutions and enhancing data security.
That said, we have in fact had a very strong virtualisation solution in the enterprise market since the introduction of the EVA range in 2001, which provides a clear migration path from DAS technologies into SAN technologies without the need to discard existing hardware.
The question is not one of “how are we going to offer SMBs storage virtualisation technology”, it is one of “what sort of storage technologies do SMBs actually need at the moment”.
Bovis
When does IBM see blade-server architecture becoming mainstream for Australian SMBs, and what does it believe are its most signifi cant challenges to delivering these solutions?
Latchford
SMB clients have been buying IBM BladeCenter servers for some time and SMB clients continue to increasingly embrace the bladeserver technology as a means to maximise their flexibility to address ever-changing business needs, speed up time to deploy new IT services and to simplify management of multiple servers and network storage services to enable IT teams to work more effi ciently.
In terms of the most signifi cant challenges to delivering blade-server solutions it comes down to SMB clients being aware of the business value blade servers.
Latchford
Your last CEO Carly Fiorina’s downfall has been attributed by many to her trying to do too much too soon. How is HP going to overcome internal distractions such as the ongoing Compaq legacy and engage with SMBs that need an “always on” tech partner?
Bovis
HP today is proof enough that there are no legacy issues to distract us from our customer’s business. The HP Compaq merger has created one of the strongest IT supplier companies in the world that is continuing to lead Australia’s SMB sector for provision. There can be little doubt that our range, quality and nature of services and products supplied to our channel and SMBs in Australia would not be at the same level, without the knowledge and experience that the Compaq merger brought in.
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