Now you may ask yourself, when hasn't IBM been aggressive? Truth is, there's a normal proactive business plan that any competent company should follow--and if its competitors happen to fall by the wayside as a result, well, that's just business.
Then there's the General William Tecumseh Sherman business plan, as aptly described in a 1995 article for the Emory University School of Law: "Sherman's practice was to manoeuvre a substantial portion of his forces around the enemy's position; to attack or to threaten its lines of supply and communication; and thereby to force the opposing army to leave its fortifications and to withdraw."
Once out in the open, the numerical superiority of Sherman's army usually foretold the outcome. Generally speaking there's no disagreement that IBM is one of the more numerically superior companies in a variety of ways.
IBM has already run a few moderately successful IT campaigns against the entrenched forces of Sun and the green troops of Dell. With its Compaq merger now theoretically on track thanks to a narrow voting margin, Hewlett-Packard would seem to be a ripe candidate for a few IBM sorties during the onset of the inevitable marketing confusion resulting from the two companies' attempts to assimilate each other. At this point, any loss of market share for HP has potentially devastating effects, as the merger with Compaq was, to a great extent, predicated on the cumulative market strength offered by the two companies' newly combined customer bases. Should IBM put a move on Hewlett-Packard, however, it may find that HP is not as vulnerable as it might seem.
HP has been layering on defences during the last two years--almost as if in anticipation of the event, according to Mark Hudson, director of worldwide marketing, HP Business Systems and Technology Organisation. Now that the PA-8700 processor has been integrated into the servers and the pricing has been dropped, Hudson says, "The HP rp2430 and rp2470 offer the best performance, high availability and performance density of any entry-level Unix solution on the market." In the midrange, where HP has been a leader for some time, the company's added an 8-way rp7410 with many of the same Superdome features already found in its somewhat upscale 16-way rp8400.
On the high-end, HP claims it's making money on its Superdomes despite the economic downturn that seems to have afflicted others. In fact, HP just introduced a 2Gb per second fibre channel host bus adaptor (HBA) that doubles the performance of the previous HBA without raising the price.
Then there are alliances that shouldn't be overlooked. Oracle is no friend to IBM, and HP has had a standing relationship with the company. HP's partnership with BEA will also do it well. Hudson claims that HP's link to system integrators is another major benefit. According to him, the typical finger pointing often found in multiple vendor relationships is not an issue for HP and adds that many potential customers prefer the luxury (and negotiating leverage) of being able to deal with several sources instead of just one.
Linux plays an important part in HP's strategy but not always as the star of the cast. While it enjoyed a leading role in Hewlett-Packard's blade offerings, HP is also developing appropriate application binary interfaces (ABIs) that will allow Linux software to run under HP-UX. Forecasts Hudson, "It's easy to envision a partitioned Superdome running HP-UX on IPF (Itanium Processor Family) where Linux development is occurring in one partition and where it can immediately be taken over to the HP-UX side and run. Naturally, there's Windows support as well within HP's server families.
On careful inspection, it seems as if HP has covered itself on all sides while not getting bogged down in the process. That, too, is a military strategy, one popularised by the Romans and called the "Tortuga," or turtle. A phalanx of legionnaires would stop to surround itself with the oblong shields they carried when attacked by arrows, spears, or stones. It may not sound elegant but, once the attack was over, the legionnaires stood up and entered attack mode. It's a large part of the strategy that helped create the Roman Empire.
