HP charts Linux course
Published: 04 Dec 2003 12:40 GMT
Are you steering customers from HP-UX to Linux?
If they're more business application-oriented, the path is HP-UX. Four to five years from now, from a server perspective, Unix is $20bn (£11.6bn), Windows is $20bn and Linux is $9bn. That's why we don't do "it's all about Linux." That's not reality. From a migration perspective, we have some 64-bit customers who have moved to Linux. Those who are running huge SAP systems are still HP-UX.
Do you see a time when Unix will disappear?
Any planning beyond three years is way out there. In the three-year time frame, which is what we call the foreseeable future, Unix is flat. It's not a growth business. A lot of the growth is going to Linux, but the Unix business is not going away. There are players in the Unix market smack in the sights of Linux. Solaris is the Unix going away.
Why is Sun the big Linux victim?
When Linux started, it was mostly on the Web server applications. That was the market where Sun exploded. Sun's business is all skewed into the low-end business. HP and IBM are skewed mid to high. Linux came in at the low end. The cost value proposition and the low switching cost meant it was a dead-centre nuclear explosion, where Sun's business was. Everyplace Linux is strong is where Sun historically has been strong and HP has been weak. For us, this is a completely incremental play. It's a beautiful thing.
Put on the hat of your counterpart at Sun, and tell me what you would do.
That's a hard question. They have a fundamentally broken business model. Sun is trying to play its cards in too many places. They're defocused. They're making irrational, emotional decisions. With the desktop, that's an emotional thing -- trying to take on Bill Gates and stick it in his eye. It is not grounded on any business reality. If you're Dell, and your business is growing, and you want to grow into new areas like consumer electronics, that makes sense. If your business is tanking, and you're on your way down, you should be focusing on your core business and getting your cost envelope to something you can afford, and then say, "how do I grow from here?"
I think Sun has to paint an end-of-life picture for Sparc. People are internalising some of their press releases around (Advanced Micro Devices') Opteron as that being the alternative. Having done the migration from (HP's chip) PA-RISC to Itanium, we've been doing that for eight years. You can't just flip a switch and say, "yesterday it was Sparc, today it's Opteron." It doesn't work like that. You need to get your ISV (independent software vendor) partners there; you need to get your virtualisation story straight. The other challenge is that Solaris on Opteron and Solaris on Sparc are two completely different operating systems. You can't just take all your Solaris Sparc stuff and move it to Opteron.
Does (Sun chief executive Scott) McNealy rub people the wrong way?
I think we have a personality issue with Mr. McNealy. He's being a little too arrogant and cocky for the position he's in. A few spoonfuls of humble pie might be appropriate. But that's the board of directors' job.
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