-----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Timothy Sipples Sent: Tuesday, August 18, 2009 6:14 PM To: [email protected] Subject: The Death of Servers and Software
Hewlett-Packard reported its 3Q earnings earlier today: http://h30261.www3.hp.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=3D71087&p=3Dirol-newsArticle&= ID=3D1322129 A few highlights: 1. "Industry standard server" revenues are down 21% (quarter, year to year). And it's not a single quarterly fluke: revenues are also down ov= er 24% (nine months, year to year). These are the Intel/AMD X86 servers. Clearly this means that X86 servers are dead. And because they are "industry standard," that obviously means the entire standard server industry is dead. 2. "Non-industry standard server" ... oh, sorry... "Business critical server" revenues are down over 30% (quarter, year to year). And it's no= t a single quarterly fluke: revenues are also down over 25% (nine months, y= ear to year). These are almost all Intel Itanium-based servers running HP/U= X (UNIX) plus a few NonStop Kernel (NSK) servers. Clearly this means that= distributed UNIX and NSK servers are even more dead. 3. HP doesn't break out profit ("earnings from operations") separately = for these two units, but for the overall "Enterprise Storage and Servers" division, profits were down 34.5% (quarter, year to year) and a whoppin= g 46% (nine months, year to year). Clearly since the profit is declining = even faster than sales, HP server R&D investment is really, really dead. Whi= ch fits, actually: there hasn't been a new Itanium CPU since....when was t= hat again? (Anybody remember?) 4. Perhaps services and software will help fill the gap? HP doesn't actually produce too much software, and anyway that business was down t= oo (22% for the quarter, year to year; 15% for the nine months, year to ye= ar). So obviously software is dead. The EDS acquisition makes services comparisons hard for now, so more time is needed before deciding that's= dead. <SNIP> I guess this means I should throw out my laptop, file server, etc. at home as well. Long live COBOL. Regards, Steve Thompson -- Opinions expressed by this poster may not reflect those held by poster's employer -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
