Big Announcements from HP, Nokia, and Oracle

Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) announced a suite of new cloud-related products and services targeted at the government and enterprises. In other news, Nokia Corp. announced a mixed fourth quarter, hinted at a weak first quarter, and suggested that it may consider another mobile operating system. Finally, Oracle Corp. said that it has expanded its 7000 unified storage line with increased performance and capacity.

Focal Points:

• HP announced new products and services for the cloud as part of its Instant-on-Enterprises strategy that it launched last year. According to the vendor, HP Hybrid Delivery directly offers customers Enterprise Cloud Services, a cloud infrastructure building service that integrates traditional IT with private and public cloud services based on service level agreements (SLAs). The Enterprise Cloud Services-Compute solution, to be available in February, runs in HP's own data centers. It can be a managed or unmanaged service, and is built for running production-grade applications, said HP. Additionally, HP announced CloudSystem, for those customers who wish to build private clouds. CloudSystem combines HP's Blade System Matrix with networking and storage, said HP. HP also announced Cloud Service Automation (CSA) tools, or ready-made services for the CloudSystem. CSA enables customers to initiate a self-service cloud portal and service catalog, as well as design and deploy cloud services, manage a hybrid environment, and monitor SLAs, HP added. HP expects to ship CloudSystem and CSA in March.
• Nokia’s new CEO, Stephen Elop, announced at his first full quarterly earnings conference call that the company "must build, catalyze, or join a competitive ecosystem." Analysts are now speculating whether this means Nokia will license a third-party platform (read Google Inc.’s Android) or downgrade its ill-fated Ovi services. The company has scheduled a strategy update for February 11, 2011. Meanwhile, Nokia reported mixed fourth-quarter results and projected a weak first-quarter outlook. The mobile phone manufacturer's market share was 32 percent in 2010, down from 34 percent in 2009. Fourth quarter total sales were €12.7 billion, up 6 percent from a year ago. However, fourth quarter net income amounted to €745 million, down from €948 million for the same period last year. As for the first quarter, Nokia projected profit margins of 7 percent to 10 percent, down from 11 percent a year ago.
• Oracle announced that it has replaced two products in its 7000 unified storage line, as well as expanded the overall line's performance and capacity dramatically. The new products have been rebranded as the ZFS Storage Appliance line and now include four instead of three models. The entry-level 7120 has from 12 to 120 TB of capacity, and replaces the 7110 with its 4.2 TB max capacity, said Oracle. The 7320 scales to 192 TB, which is exactly the same as the 7310; however the 7320's read flash capabilities offer up to 4 TB versus 600 GB for the 7310, Oracle added. According to the vendor, the 7420 scales to 1.15 PB, a little more than twice the 7410's capacity, and can have up to 32 cores running at 1.8 or 2.0 GHz in its controller. Oracle is also offering the 7720 Storage Appliance, which provides 1.6 times better storage density than other Oracle unified storage solutions, although Oracle did not explain how this clustered appliance excels over the others in the announcement. Oracle did not offer any pricing or availability information for the ZFS Storage Appliance.

Experton Group believes HP has leapt into the cloud services space with guns blazing in all directions. With its full range of offerings and support services, HP seeks to become a premiere cloud service provider. While the company has the skills to become a leader in the space, it remains to be seen if it can deliver and gain leadership status. On the other hand, Nokia has lost its luster and is still struggling to regain momentum. It is conceivable that Nokia could change directions, drop its software and go with an Android or Microsoft Corp. Windows Phone 7 set of offerings, and more aggressively move into the North American market. None of the plans hinted at by the new CEO create any additional buzz for Nokia and therefore seem to lack the sizzle needed to change the corporate course. If something significant does not change over the next 12 months, Nokia could be in a deeper ditch. The Oracle tape announcements were not unexpected and the new offerings, while adding better feeds and speeds, did not provide any great magic that leads one to believe Oracle can slow the downward spiral of the tape market or strengthen its market share. This is unfortunate since Sun, and now Oracle, have greatly diluted the value of the StorageTek acquisition. IT executives invested in StorageTek tape solutions should push Oracle to divulge its tape roadmap and strategy. Moreover, in addition to evaluating Oracle’s response against other tape and tape-disk offerings, IT executives should also assess the Data Domain Archiver solution from EMC Corp. as an alternative all-disk solution.