HP 'will not lose sleep' over Sun victory

Sun on Thursday announced that ActewAGL, a Canberra-based provider of electricity, natural gas and water services to 300,000 customers, has switched to its SPARC platform to improve performance and reduce costs.

Commenting on the deal, ActewAGL's chief information officer Carsten Larsen, said he "no longer had any faith in HP's Tru64 technology" and wanted an alternative 64-bit computing system.

"Upon looking at what the market had to offer, we chose Sun's SPARC servers and Solaris operating system because it provided a simple yet robust, cost-effective solution," said Larsen.

Sun's sales director in Australia and New Zealand, Duncan Bennet, twisted the knife by claiming that this win is "only the beginning". "There are many companies like ActewAGL that are reluctant to migrate their critical applications to the pricier, untested Itanium architecture... We believe customers will find SPARC and Solaris a safer, more compelling option than competitive solutions," he said.

Within hours, HP responded by issuing a statement from its critical systems manager Steve Williamson, who downplayed the importance of the deal because HP was making "significant inroads into Sun's install base".

"In Australia we have already signed-up 300 customers who are running more than 500 of HP's Intel Itanium 2-based Integrity Servers... It's clear that Australian customers are seeing the benefit of running multiple operating systems on the one platform and are enjoying... improvements in performance that our competitors simply cannot match," said Williamson.

However, Matthew Boon, managing vice president for Gartner Australia, said the whole sqabble is about a deal that neither company would lose any sleep over.

"Clearly HP and Sun are vigorous competitors. They both have their good moments and their tough moments in the market. This is an AU$200,000 deal and probably isn't something HP will lose a lot of sleep over," said Boon.

However, Boon said there have been reports from Australia and New Zealand that HP is having trouble satisfying customers from the lower end of the market.

"We have heard from a number of users in Australia, particularly the small to mid-tier users, that perhaps they are not getting the attention they feel they should be getting from HP when they look to migrate platforms," said Boon, who suggested that this could be the reason for ActewAGL's corrosive remarks.

"HP has just announced a step up to the 8900, so I wonder if this is a client that is more unhappy with HP than the actual architecture," said Boon.