How have Encompass members reacted to Carly Fiorina's departure from HP, and its new leadership under Mark Hurd? We typically don't get involved in the business politics. We're primarily focused on the technology. Mark did show up at [the user] event in Orlando. He was very well received. It was a very different presence than we'd seen in the past. He was very focused and results-oriented, and it appears if you look at the earnings report and the press ... they're getting the results they expect. I know I'm having to wait on lead times to get hardware.

The Opteron ... [and] the [HP ProLiant] DL585 servers are a little backed up on the delivery. It's just demand.

So you feel like they're executing well? Seems to be. They've made some recent, good hires. And it looks like a very positive future.

What would you like to see HP address from a technology standpoint? I'd like to have lower cost. A lot of our community is also focused on virtualization and business integration. Obviously, your data center is pretty homogenous now in terms of the number of servers available to you. HP provides some good management tools to tie all those together. I think hardware is going to become more and more of a commodity, so whatever tools and technology can be produced to manage that is going to help lower the cost of running a large data center.

Is virtualization coming through on its promise to ease data center management? We personally bought some DL585s and connected them up to the [storage-area network], and the number of servers we were able to connect up and performance we got was almost triple what we were doing before. So I think it's getting there.