HP uses open-source for 'Switzerland' strategy

22.05.2006
Christine Martino was appointed vice president of Hewlett-Packard Co.'s open-source and Linux organization last November. An 18-year veteran of HP, Martino spoke with Computerworld this month about the company's open-source strategy. Excerpts from the interview follow:

Your organization is part of HP's enterprise storage and servers division, yet it works in all areas of the company where there is open-source or Linux activity. How do you measure the contributions you make to HP's bottom line? That's not an easy thing to calculate. We look at a number of different factors -- our Linux server sales, for instance. We also measure how much [business] in Linux and open-source services we help drive. There are some softer measures, [such as] how many deals have we helped [win] because we have open-source knowledge.

One analyst compared HP to Switzerland, because you can play in the Unix, Linux and Windows markets simultaneously without offending any business partners. I like being called the Switzerland of the high-tech industry. It applies in operating systems but also up the stack as well. Our goal is to have a level playing field across platforms, from HP-UX to Windows to Linux. I know very, very few customers that have a homogeneous environment. They have legacy systems to deal with [and] new applications going up.

IBM is the big company most identified with open-source, more so than HP. And Sun has made Solaris and other pieces of its technologies open-source. Is there any danger that Sun will eclipse HP in the eyes of the open-source community? I'm not very worried about Sun eclipsing us in the mind-share battle or any other one. Our strategy works for customers because it offers them what they need.

Do you plan to offer any more open-source applications in the near future? For the initial middleware stacks we're focusing on, we're in pretty good shape. We wanted to have a directory services stack, a data-base stack and a J2EE stack. We've got the pieces together for that now, and that's what our customers have wanted so far. We'll probably add more components, but right now, we have a pretty good mix. What I'm telling the team to focus on is tying these stacks of open-source middleware components to specific commercial application areas or things higher up the stack -- like SAP, for example, or specific vertical applications.

Would HP ever get in the game of acquiring open-source vendors? It's not a high priority for me right now to buy open-source content across different products, because our strategy of choice is from the [operating system] layer to middleware. I don't see the benefit of breaking that strategy in either the open-source or commercial software side.