Can you bet the server farm on HP?

Carly Fiorina, Hewlett-Packard’s chairman and CEO, chose her words carefully. “The new HP will be a company you can count on,” she declared.

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Her proclamation went forth during Fiorina’s keynote address at HP World Conference & Expo in September, only four months after HP completed its $19.7 billion acquisition of Compaq one year ago this week.

The speech exemplified Fiorina’s mission to rewrite the enterprise IT history books. It used to be said that no one got fired for buying IBM, the company upon which HP has squarely trained its crosshairs since the merger. But can the same be said for HP? With the passage of time, technologists are seeking reassurance that HP has backed the right products in the merger.

One of the four executives who planned and oversaw the merger, Shane Robison argues that HP got every technology decision right. “I can’t think of an instance where if we could start over again, we would do it differently,” says Robison, executive vice president and chief strategy and technical officer at HP in Palo Alto, Calif.

Every decision was made with the understanding that HP must build products and services based on a lower-cost model, Robinson explains. “Our value proposition is to deliver high-technology solutions, which is a combination of services, software, and hardware at a best-in-class price. If you compare that with [competitors] Dell and IBM, our approach is to be high tech, low cost.”

The old HP way manifested as a slow decision-making culture with technically elegant but expensive products. What has emerged is an aggressive, street-fighting style driven by a conviction that competitively priced products with a clear technical advantage will give HP the edge in the consolidating IT industry. Also driving HP’s new approach is a desire to project the image of a comprehensive enterprise services provider on par with IBM.

But according to analysts, the road ahead will not be easy. “You have to give [Fiorina] credit for bringing on capable management, but they don’t have a strong direction of distinguishing advantage. IBM has them beat in terms of being the worthy, reliable enterprise provider. Dell has them beat in terms of cost and can provide all the same HP can, with the exception of the legacy systems. And Sun has a strong Unix presence,” says Will Zachmann, president of Canopus Research in Duxbury, Mass.

HP’s Robison and other HP executives counter that their value proposition holds up under competitive pressure. IBM is too expensive, and Dell lacks product breadth and a services business.

“We are certainly less proprietary in the overall solution stack than IBM, which allows us to continue to push hard on the price side of things,” Robison says.

Most industry observers believe HP has given itself a fighting chance to succeed — with but a few exceptions — in its decisions regarding which products would survive the merger. Good technology decisions include retaining Compaq’s ProLiant line of Wintel-based servers rather than HP’s Wintel lineup, such as the NetServer.

One user who had relied on the NetServer product had no problems migrating to Compaq’s ProLiant product. “We haven’t seen any degradation of products or services. We did see the obsolescence of some HP server lines, but we expected some to go away,” says Ken Parchinski, CTO of Automated Resources Group in Montvale, N.J.