HP does a lot of hardware on the consumer side, but they've been doing quite well in the enterprise without much ballyhoo. And the margins are way better in the enterprise than on the PC side (not counting "the ink is worth more than unobtainium" side of their business).
Yes, but you can bet that any manager that was about to plunk down a large amount of money for HP stuff with a sense of continuity is now looking at the competition.
The kind of boat-rocking that HP is engaging in is every corporate buyers nightmare and will cause a lot of sleepless nights in the houses of people procuring their enterprise product line.
I work in this field, with lots of HP hardware, and its not even discussed.
The lifecycle of new enterprise hardware is ~3 years. No one thinks HP would leave any enterprise customer screwed in the 3 year timeframe. Even if they sold the business everyone understands you will be supported that long.
Also, companies change hands all the time in the enterprise market. We're used to it, and generally a change of ownership is greeted with a meh response.
You're both right. While it is true that for the hardware business, HP's stability is surely good enough. On the other hand, when it comes to enterprise contracts, stability matters a lot more.
I have at least some first-hand evidence to this fact. $DAYJOB is currently at a large enterprise service provider. We are currently buying HP switches like crazy, and I don't expect that to change. I've also been privy to some aspects of the sales process. We can go through the sales song and dance forever and ever, going deeper and deeper in to technical and business details. However, when the prospect asks about company stability, size, and governance, this always signifies they are about to ask for a formal contract.
In other words, for big, enterprise customers, stability matters. It's impossible to tell what sort of effect this will have on HP. Maybe none. But these sorts of subtle changes to reputation have a funny trajectory of their own, independent of the instantaneous news cycle. I wouldn't be surprised if IBM et al. started using the shake-up to their advantage during the sales process. We very well might see some of the after-effects in the next six months.
The way HP handles this transition will be critical. If the board looks like they are floundering, I think they will be toast. If they can keep up the appearance of running a tight ship, they'll be alright.
It would seem to me that de-emphasis of the consumer side (i.e., psg and webos) to focus on the enterprise should have (in theory, at least) lead to greater confidence to enterprise buyers.
I don't know much about how smart a purchase Autonomy is (was?), but I do know that IBM has been acquiring data companies like crazy over the past 3 years.
when the prospect asks about company stability, size, and governance, this always signifies they are about to ask for a formal contract.
This is absolutely the case. But people still don't even bother asking about HP (same as IBM & Oracle & Microsoft & SAP). It's just not an issue at all at the moment.
