HP One Series servers destined for greatness in local channel

9 March 2009

In an effort to curb IT expenditure while remaining competitive with their peers from a technology standpoint, companies of all sizes have begun re-examining their buying criteria to eliminate the proverbial fat. "In a nutshell," says Greg Pothitos, HP ESS business unit manager at Tarsus Technologies, "technology buyers are looking for better value for money than ever before. And they're prepared to trade high-end value-adds such as onsite support and one-day turnaround times on repairs for more cost-efficiency.

Pothitos says, "This is traditionally not been something that the leading international vendors have been good at. "That's because those high-level value-adds have been the only real differentiators vendors had going for them," he continues. "The perception in the market for the longest time has been that the hardware that international vendors supply to their customers is largely the same as the hardware supplied by a local vendor."

However, Pothitos says that nothing could be further from the truth.

"Thousands of hours of research and development, coupled with superior assembly facilities and sufficient buying power to secure the best quality components in the market makes an enormous difference with results that can be seen in the lower rate of returns and support requests received from customers," he says.

Pothitos says it has taken some time, but international vendors such as HP have realised they have something of great value to offer customers, outside of the high-level value-add they classically relied on for differentiation.

And this is undoubtedly the primary reason HP has launched the One Series of servers.

Pothitos says that this new range of server hardware benefits from the same research and development, superior build quality and buying power as HP's other ranges do, but instead is a no-nonsense bare-bones solution for customers with their eye on cost-efficiency.

"Testimony to HP's faith in this new range of products shines through in its support - if this was in any way an inferior product range, HP wouldn't be giving it this level of backing," Pothitos confirms.

"With options in every form factor - from 2U rackmount to small form factor - this product range is perfect for departmental file serving, high-density processing or high-density storage," he says.

"And because the range doesn't come with any value-adds, there's plenty of room for resellers to differentiate the offering by adding their own value-added services to the mix.

"We're confident that this range will achieve good success," he concludes.