The new offerings include ProLiant servers, Lights Out management tools and Citrix and Microsoft Exchange services aimed at businesses with 100 to 1,000 employees.
Hewlett-Packard will begin 2008 focused on grabbing sales in the midmarket—the 500,000 or more businesses worldwide with between 100 and 1,000 employees.
The Palo Alto, Calif., company is announcing a number of hardware and software products plus services, designed to push HP deeper into the space where the competition includes IBM and Dell.
This first product HP released for this initiative in September was dubbed "Shorty," or the BladeSystem c3000 enclosure that was specifically designed for these smaller companies.
The new offerings for midmarket that HP is introducing Jan. 14 include four new ProLiant servers, refreshing several older ProLiant system models, software packages from Microsoft and Citrix and new services for both HP channel partners and customers.
The new servers also include HP's Lights Out management tools that allow IT managers to control the infrastructure remotely.
The concept is to offer midmarket companies with small IT departments that ability to install and manage an infrastructure that can support the daily operations of a business.
"These types of businesses are savvy enough to understand what the hardware can do and they do understand a lot about the total cost of ownership," said Paul Gottsegen, vice president of marketing for HP Industry Standard Servers. "In these types of businesses, there is typically one group doing all the work and those people really appreciate having hardware that has an end-to-end solution stack and the types of remote management tools that really provide a security blanket that is going to work."
Read here about HP's partner enhancements.
Gottsegen added that about half of the ProLiant servers HP sells are for midmarket companies and it is important for HP to offer a combination of hardware, software and services that address that market.
While HP has been positioning itself as a supplier to the midmarket, IBM and Dell are not falling behind. Earlier this month, IBM announced plans to reorganize its hardware group to better focus on small and midsize businesses. In the past six months, Dell has introduced its concept of "Simplified IT," which looks to reduce the complexity of installing IT infrastructure.
Gordon Haff, an analyst with Illuminata, said the real key to what HP is offering for the midmarket is the types of services it offers customers through its channel partners.
"What HP has is some nice, incremental improvements to its hardware, but its real strength is the ongoing work with partners and its channel in putting these solutions together and that's very much part of the execution that they really have to keep up with," Haff said.
The new ProLiant servers all support either two Intel or Advanced Micro Devices processors. The ProLiant DL180 and DL185 are each 2U (3.5-inch) systems. The ProLiant DL160 and DL165 are each 1U (1.75-inch) servers. HP also updated several other ProLiant servers with new Intel and AMD processors.
In addition to the new hardware and Lights Out management tools, HP is including Citrix Access Essentials, which allows for remote access to applications in a network. The new offerings also include Microsoft Exchange Server 2007.
The ProLiant DL160 G5 and DL185 G5 are available from HP immediately, while the DL180 G5 and DL165 G5 will be available in 90 days. The DL160 G5 starts at $1,399 and the DL185 G5 at $1,749.
