HP unveils its Just Right IT portfolio of hardware and software, which it calls reliable, affordable technology for SMBs. At the center is its ProLiant Microserver system.
Hewlett-Packard is looking to make life easier for small and midsize
businesses with a portfolio of products the company is calling Just Right IT.
Unveiled Sept. 8, the Just Right IT offerings range from a
server and desktop PCs to storage products, printers, networking and
communications solutions, and management and virtualization software. The goal
is to give smaller businesses the reliability and manageability that larger
enterprises enjoy with their IT purchases, but at appropriate prices, Lisa
Wolfe, manager of HP's Worldwide Small and Midsize Business Leader, said in an
interview with eWEEK.
"They don't have to compromise when buying IT," Wolfe
said.
At the heart of the Just Right IT portfolio is HP's new
ProLiant Microserver, designed to give the smallest of businesses full
capabilities in a reliable and secure system, said Jim Ganthier, vice president
of marketing for HP's Industry Standard Servers unit.
The system, built for businesses with 10 or fewer employees, is
powered by an Athlon II chip from Advanced Micro Devices, and offers up to 8GB
of DDR3 (double data rate 3) memory. Pricing
starts at $329.
"This is a full-fledged ProLiant," Ganthier said.
"This class of customer has the same kinds of problems that enterprises
have."
Smaller businesses also are struggling with tightened IT
budgets and the need to pare costs, he said. They also have additional
problems, such as small or no IT staff and difficulty getting necessary credit
for new technologies.
It's an attractive market for HP, Ganthier said, estimating
that about 1.7 million businesses will be buying their first servers sometime
in the next five years. HP is looking to differentiate itself from competitors
by making the ProLiant's performance and reliability capabilities available to
the space.
"We're going to take that and focus it on the SMB
market," he said.
John Fruehe, AMD's director
of product marketing for AMD server and
workstation products, said in a company blog post that the ProLiant Microserver's attributes include reliability and
affordability.
"Small businesses demand reliability because many, perhaps
most, don't have a dedicated IT person-if they have a problem it can mean
calling in an expensive consultant to resolve the situation," Fruehe
wrote. "And if these small businesses are going to buy a server, it needs
to be affordable. Quiet operation might not seem as intuitive, but in a really
small office with a handful of employees, you don't want a jet engine, you want
something quiet (and power efficient and that doesn't take up much
space.)"
Along with the Microserver, HP also is offering its 500B and
505B Series business minitower desktops, which run Windows 7 and offer
configurable hard drives and several bays and ports. As for storage, HP introduced
the StorageWorks P2000 G3 Modular Smart Array and the P4000 Virtual SAN
Appliance software. The P4000 Virtual SAN
Appliance software enables businesses with virtualized servers to move shared
storage without buying a physical SAN (storage
area network) infrastructure.
In addition, HP announced the Officejet Pro 8500A e-All-in-One
and Officejet 7500A Wide Format e-All-in-One Web-connected printers, its new
Insight with Microsoft System Center Essentials 2010 management software for
companies with virtualized servers and storage, and Virtualization Smart
Bundles, which can be used with Microsoft's Hyper-V Server 2008 R2
virtualization technology. Comprising storage, servers and networking
technology, the Virtualization Smart Bundles are intended for customers that
have never had virtualization capabilities in their infrastructure.
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