Hewlett-Packard’s (HP) $13.9 billion bid to buy Electronic Data Systems (EDS) made it through U.S. antitrust review, the companies reported Monday. The deal still hinges on approval by European regulators and a vote by EDS shareholders, who will meet July 31.

It remains unclear how the deal will affect channel partners from both companies. HP CEO Mark Hurd has said that there will be no bumps in the road for channel partners since EDS and HP play mostly in different fields. Still, concerns run high among partners and will until the future unfolds after final approval. It is also unclear what will happen to the long-term relationships EDS holds with HP competitors like Cisco Systems, Dell and IBM. Read more »

Sun Microsystems says it will help partners build eco-friendly IT solutions.

The company’s Eco Advantage Program offers partners tools to calculate for themselves or for their customers how to deploy the best, most energy efficient information technology.

“Partners can take customer data at the server and app level, profile [that] and develop the best case analysis/scenario. They can provide the carbon emission savings, space savings, cooling savings, ” said Bill Cate, senior director of global channel planning and programs for Palo Alto-based Sun.

The program includes the afore mentioned Eco Assessment Service, which evaluates actual data center energy use, cooling, air flow etc.; training on data center power and cooling needs; and modeling tools to help simulate energy requirements of alternative datacenter setups.

Helping customers save money is one way to go into accounts in a collaborative way, said Dermot Duggan, senior director for Sun’s eco drive.

“You can go into your installed base or new accounts and have a rare opportunity where you will get no pushback. You can say, ‘I can save you this much money’ and back that up with real data tied to the customer’s actual servers and storage.”

Hardly any customer will say no to paying less, right?

Vince Conroy, CTO of FusionStorm, San Francisco-based Sun partner said the program aligns with what his company is doing.

“We’ve developed a data center practice and energy conservation is an important component of that,” Conroy said.

Technologies like server virtualization, thin clients, virtual desktop computing, all play into that message.

And, since FusionStorm does some of its own hosting as well as managed services, cost savings are important to its bottom line as well.

Customers are starting to ask about energy efficient computing, although it’s not yet a groundswell, he said. ” It starts with some of the more forward thinking customers and they may be forward thinking because it makes business sense and they’re business savvy or this is a cause for them. In either case we’re seeing more activity [in energy efficient computing.”

Server virtualization, as has been reported endlessly, is one way to get bigger workloads out of fewer boxes and that will be key here. Asked whether it’s really in Sun’s best interests to sell fewer rather than more boxes and CPUs

As to whether it’s really in Sun’s best interests to sell fewer servers, Cates and Duggan said the trend is clear. Either Sun will sell more efficient technology or someone else will.
For hosting partners, the attraction of saving on cooling and electricity is obvious, but it’s also away for partners to help customers save money and perhaps divert some of those savings to additional services.

And the company’s quick to say it’s taking its own medicine, that its latest servers, built on the UltraSPARC T2 chips use multithreading technology and cram 5X the compute power into half the space and get 2.5 times better performance per megawatt.
The Sun execs said the company, through its own eco efforts, received $1 million in rebates onfrom PG&E over the last 12 months.

The company is hardly alone many hardware vendors have jumped on the green bandwagon: Hewlett Packard and IBM also have eco initiatives going.

 Barbara Darrow can be reached at bdarrow@techtarget.com.

Hewlett-Packard yesterday began shipping VMware’s ESX 3i hypervisor embedded in its ProLiant servers.

After news broke last month that Dell may give away the ESX 3i for free with its servers, VMware resellers began to fear that other VMware OEM partners would follow suit — essentially killing their business in ESX 3i sales. But that isn’t happening in HP’s case, as virtualization.info reports that the company will charge $495 extra for servers with the ESX 3i.

All of VMware’s OEM partners should begin shipping servers with the ESX 3i sometime this month, and it will be interesting to see if the others follow Dell’s strategy or HP’s. Microsoft’s Hyper-V also hits the market later this year, and that release should have a major effect on VMware’s ESX 3i pricing as well. Microsoft plans to charge just $28 extra for Windows Server 2008 editions that feature Hyper-V.

HP brought in NFL Hall of Famer Steve Young to speak to the partner faithful bright-and-early Wednesday morning. And he did not disappoint. Some 1,000 or more partners were in Las Vegas for the annual partner conference and a pretty good number showed up for Young.

Peering out at the darkened hall, Young noted the obvious: “A 9 a.m. talk at Caesar’s Palace and there are people here? Was attendance mandatory?”

Young said his speaking gigs are relatively easy given the prevalent jock stereotypes, and the low expectations they engender.  ”If I can string two sentences together, people think, ‘Hey! Not bad.”

Who knew that aside from his Super Bowl MVP and top quarterback rankings Young is also a lawyer? And a big philanthropist? Not me, but then again, baseball’s my game.

Young followed printer kingpin Vyomesh Joshi who issued a call to arms to a pretty fair subset of the 1,100 partners in attendance for his 8 a.m. keynote.

“If you’re in hardware, get into supplies. If you’re in hardware and supplies, get into services,” Joshi said

Joshi, often known as VJ, painted a picture of a whopping $280 billion market for printing and imaging from the home devices to huge commercial printers that use ink by the liter.

The Scitex wide-format machines that print signs for Times Square and similar venues soak up liters of ink. “Not ccs, liters. I love liters,” Joshi joked to the early morning crowd.

Conversely , he also touted HP’s recycling and green printing efforts.

He estimated the worldwide enterprise printing and image market to be about $53 billion. In that segment, HP reserves 900 named accounts for its direct focus. He cordoned off about 4,000 accounts in “named territory” accounts and the additional 8 million SMB accounts which the company hopes to attack with partners.

“We will be consistent and clear. We will not go after those 4,000 accounts, we’ll provide the names and help plan for them but for those 4,000 accounts we need your help.”

The vast majority of printing remains analog. Translating all of that to digital “where HP can play” is a huge opportunity. And for that to happen, partners need to help HP persuade IT departments to network all their printers and copiers, he said. That infrastructure work is another opportunity for VARs.

Joshi then gave way to the former San Francisco 49er great .

Ensuring attendees left on a high note, Sheryl Crow played Wednesday night. Some of us couldn’t be there — flying out of lovely 70-degree-and-sunshine-Vegas weather back to the frozen Northeast tundra. But according to second-hand accounts, Crow was stellar.

Barbara Darrow can be reached at bdarrow@techtarget.com

Hewlett-Packard has logged robust growth but could do better, especially in the U.S. and in SMBs, HP CEO Mark Hurd said Monday.

Kicking off HP’s annual Americas Partner Conference (APC) in Las Vegas, Hurd (hoarse with a cold) also disputed the notion of some partners that the company wants them to be exclusive to HP while HP continues to play the partner field.  

It was clear (as if there could be any doubt) that Hurd has heard the partner complaints: a balky rebate program; lagging storage lineup; channel conflict.

Bottom line, he reiterated, is that HP partners need to sell more HP gear into their accounts. That means an HP partner who sells servers should try to sell servers plus (HP) storage plus (HP) switches. You get the idea.

HP is working to resolve these issues he said, acknowledging that the company can be challenging to work with.

“I’m not going to tell you to be exclusive [but] I also don’t want to be a loss leader [in cases] where our brand goes out in a  Proliant with someone else’s memory. We don’t make much margin on low, stripped units…frankly we created some of this problem ourselves” when HP stressed unit sales in figuring out partner remuneration.

The goal is fatter, more margin-rich solution sales. And thus HP echoes similar themes from IBM, from Microsoft, from Oracle.

All of these companies want to widen their footprint in existing accounts while adding net-new customers.

Some partners see these tactics as one-sided in the vendor’s favor, if not a one-way street

HP has grown from $80 billion in sales in 2004 to $105 billion in three years. Hurd said outside analysts expect the company to hit the $111 to $112  billion mark this year.

Sixty-nine percent of HP’s business comes from overseas, and Hurd wants to see the company increase strength in the U.S.

And the bulk of its sales has been and will remain through the channel.

But HP faces its own risks. Partners frustrated with what they see as non-competitive storage offerings signed on with EqualLogic for its iSCSI storage expertise only to see Dell buy that company and are now faced with the prospect of Dell as a vendor partner. Still, with Dell making channel friendly noise, some are disposed to give it a try.

A few partners said they had hoped HP would buy EqualLogic and are now hoping it’ll make another move on Lefthand Networks or another iSCSI player to bolster its storage.

Barbara Darrow can be reached at bdarrow@techtarget.com.