[Info-vax] HP to axe 30,000 jobs to cut costs

[John Wallace]

On May 26, 6:56 am, JF Mezei <jfmezei.spam... at vaxination.ca> wrote:
> This past week, the speculation on job cuts was clarified by HP:
>
> HP Launches Multi-year Restructuring to Fuel Innovation and Enable
> Investmenthttp://www8.hp.com/us/en/hp-news/press-release.html?id=1247078#.T8BnC...
>
> As part of the restructuring, HP expects approximately 27,000 employees
> to exit the company, or 8.0% of its workforce as of Oct. 31, 2011, by
> the end of fiscal year 2014.
>
> HP will invest in research and development to drive innovation and
> differentiation across its core printing and personal systems
> businesses, as well as emerging areas. It will also invest in marketing,
> sales productivity and tools that simplify the customer experience and
> make it easier to do business with HP.
>
> Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking will invest to accelerate its
> research and development activities to extend its leading portfolio of
> servers, storage and networking. Together these assets create a
> Converged Infrastructure which is the foundation for top client
> initiatives such as cloud, virtualization, big data analytics, legacy
> modernization and social media.
>
> And from the financiual quarter release:
>
> Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking (ESSN) revenue declined 6%
>    year over year with an 11.2% operating margin. Networking revenue was
>     up 2%, Industry Standard Servers revenue was down 6%, Business
>     Critical Systems revenue was down 23%, and Storage revenue was up 1%
>     year over year.
>
> Yep BCS down 23%
>
> Not related to VMS, but interesting:
>
> In May 2012, HP committed to a change in its PC branding strategy. As a
> result, HP has commenced an asset impairment analysis to determine the
> current value of the Compaq trade name acquired in 2002.
>
>                 Net revenue     Earnings before taxes: (millions)
> PCs:            18,325          988
> Services:       17,457          1,902
> Printing:       12,390          1,569
> ESSN:           10,229          1,147
> etc
>
> So the enterprise storage servers and networking still delivers more
> profit than PCs although it gets only 55% of net revenues.
>
> Breaking down ESSN net revenues:
>
> Industry Standard Servers:      3186
> Storage                         990
> Business Critical Systems:      421
> Networking:                     614
>
> From the transcript document:
> Within BCS, our mission critical x86 grew double digits, but BCS
> performance continued to be impacted by Itanium revenue declines
>
> In the webcast though, Whitman says "impacted by th Oracle/Itanium issue".
>
> From the webcast of the financial analyst teleconference:http://h30261.www3.hp.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=71087&p=irol-EventDetails&E...
>
> "Business critical systems, not surprisingly, still facing challenges
> from the Oracle Itanium issue, but more important is how we're moving
> forward. Our Odyssey solution is an innovative mission-critical x86
> platform that will offer customers a transition to open standards-based
> architectures."
>
> Interesting, newly acquired Autonomy has seen revenue decline following
> acquisition from HP. (HP is kicking out the founder and replacing with
> its own staff).
>
> In the questions and asnwers:
> ##
> Even in industry standard servers, which people say to me all the time,
> isn't that a commodity business? Not if we can help it, it shouldn't be.
> Look at our next-generation Gen 8 ProLiant servers.Look at Moonshot,look
> at Odyssey.These are things that redefine that category,and that's the
> thing that we want to invest in.
> ##
>
> Moonshot is the very low energy consumption servers. Odyssey is the
> Superdome class based on x86 (glorified blade servers).

Fwiw, if I remember rightly, Moonshot does not and maybe never will
run Windows. Moonshot is ARM based, and the evidence at the moment is
that the Wintel alliance doesn't currently want the Windows that
people know and (some people) love to run on any hardware other than
x86.

In principle Moonshot looks like a smart move on HP's part. In
practice, your typical corporate IT department has been certified
Microsoft dependent for years, so Moonshot's market is likely big
corporates at one end and at the other end small or tiny companies, at
both ends requiring enough sense from the tin supplier and the end
customer to realise that a Wintel box is not always the answer. How
big is that market? It wasn't big enough for Alpha and it isn't big
enough for IA64, but beyond that I have no idea. There's two decades
of Wintel-dependence for many IT people to unlearn.

Anybody fancy VMS (32bit only) native on ARM? VMS on SIMH on ARM Linux
is probably doable today without a huge amount of effort, if it's not
already been done. I believe it's been done for Android, downloadable
as precompiled binaries from the marketplace, and what is Android if
not Google-hobbled Linux for ARM?

The volume market (one or two sockets and no manageability) in servers
*is* commodity business, whatever HP might want people to think.

What does Odyssey offer that can't sensibly be addressed by today's
high end Proliant? I leave that to you, dear reader. And what will be
the RoI from Odyssey?

Getting rid of the Compaq name (the "impairment analysis")? Why? If
you want a server or even a decent laptop, the Compaq name was always
a better place to start than the HP name. (Presario, on the other
hand, *is* better forgotten).

As for Autonomy? Who ever understood their business model (and their
business) anyway?

Have a lot of fun.