I have begun to get back into the swing of things after a time off for vacation. There was some business mixed in with the time off, as I caught up with a number of outstanding items, but generally it was good to kick back and take a breather. However, as we head into June I am expecting the pace to pick right up.

The big item in the coming weeks is the HP Technical Forum and Expo (HPTF&E) in Las Vegas and if what I saw last year is any indication of what to expect this time around, I am sure we are going to see a significant turn out. While many attendees had expressed some concerns over participating in an event that embraced more than NonStop, most had been pleasantly surprised at the overall balance that was achieved. Yes, they could still network with other NonStop users – and the party at the House of Blues certainly helped in that respect – but they were also able to listen to Mark Hurd, Ann Livermore, Randy Mott, and many other HP executives which was just not possible with the previous format.

But times have changed. Commoditization is close at hand. And I wonder how many of you saw two news stories these past couple of months, and began to connect the dots.

First up, on April 7^th 2008 IBM announced that they were combining the System I and System p onto a single hardware platform, and had elected to use the COMMON user group meeting to do so. As the press release went on to state “IBM introduced a new generation of POWER6 servers last week at COMMON and consolidated the System i and System p brands onto one hardware platform. The new servers, to be packaged under the umbrella title of IBM Power Systems, will run one or all of the company's three major SMB operating systems: i5/OS (the OS of the System I that has its roots back into the AS400 and the S/38 before that), AIX, and Linux. The company's flagship integrated platform i5/OS, whose name was more closely affiliated with the POWER5 chip, has been renamed simply IBM i.”  The press release then went on to add “when running one of the three available operating systems, the servers will become known as the i Edition, AIX Edition, or Linux Edition.  Customers will be able to order à la carte and mix and match i, AIX, and Linux operating systems on a single Power server.”

The following month, the results of HP for the second quarter of fiscal year 2008 were released, and there were some very interesting data points. According to the reporting agency Morningstar, “the Enterprise Storage and Servers (ESS) unit, responsible for 17 percent of HP’s income in the second quarter of fiscal 2008, recorded 4 percent year-over-year growth with revenue of $4.8 billion. This achievement was driven by a 68 percent gain in HP BladeSystem server sales. The blades market continues to ramp quickly as both enterprise and midsize customers adopt the technology. Gartner’s figures show that HP held 52.9 percent vendor revenue and 46.3 percent units shipped for the first quarter of calendar year 2008. Businesses are relying on Integrity server blades, including the recently announced HP Integrity BL870c, to lower the costs of powering their large, business-critical and memory-intensive workloads. Additionally, thousands of enterprise and midsize customers have embraced the award-winning HP BladeSystem c-Class design to accelerate their business growth and keep their infrastructure costs in check.”

Perhaps more importantly, however, was the other item in this same Morningstar report “Customers continue to recognize HP’s worldwide server leadership by buying more servers from the company than any other vendor, as reported by Gartner in first quarter calendar year 2008 figures released Thursday. With a 30.1 percent total unit shipment share and 29.6 percent vendor revenue share, HP maintained the No. 1 volume position and took over revenue leadership with support from its HP ProLiant, Integrity and BladeSystem lines.”

For the full story from Morningstar, check out:

http://news.morningstar.com/newsnet/ViewNews.aspx?article=/BW/20080523005598_univ.xml

Looking at both of these stories, and connecting the dots, we see that (1) HP has overtaken IBM as the largest shipper of servers and that (2) IBM is electing to combine all server platforms around a single chip-set package.

But I think we all see where this is headed. One of the worst-kept secrets within the community has to be the upcoming announcement of some sort of new Itanium-based blade package that will support NonStop, Unix, Linux (and I expect, OpenVMS and Windows), and that the pricing will be even more competitive than what IBM has come up with for its new combined System i and System p offerings. Why less expensive? From my initial observations simply as there’s far fewer packages to support – not the three server lines as is coming from IBM, but just a blade-based line from HP. And this commoditization will lead to even greater savings attractive enough to push IBM even further back. The announcements from IBM have to be viewed as a preemptive move but unfortunately, the more you look at them the less compelling the story becomes.

For the user community about to head for the major user conference of the year, and doing so as a community coming together, as a unified body, perhaps its appropriate to consider how this is coming about at exactly the point in time when HP is unifying its server line. Maybe there’s little left that will separate the cultures of the former communities, or detract from open dialogue on all sides. After all, we will have common external storage solutions, common manageability, the support of common languages and potentially the same open frameworks and containers. What will remain different will always be the availability, scalability, and data integrity attributes and isn’t it reassuring to us all that HP continues to preserve and expand our opportunity to run the premier server available. The Integrity NonStop – on something bladie!

I hope to see you all at the CONNECT party. The combined HP user community party on Tuesday night returns to the House of Blues – this year opening more of its rooms to accommodate an even bigger crowd.