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.
HP sells PCs installed with Mandriva Linux in Latin America. When could we start seeing Linux desktops in North America? We do certify Novell [Linux] on our desktops. We don't ship desktops with Linux [on a widespread basis] now because the market isn't big enough or cohesive enough from a worldwide perspective. We watch it closely, though, as does the Personal Systems Group.
Our regional groups have the freedom to work more locally if a customer wants it. So we do Mandriva in France and Brazil, and Ubuntu in South Africa. If there is big interest when SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 from Novell is released, the PSG can turn on a dime and offer it pretty quickly worldwide.