News release

New Customer Wins Drive HP BladeSystem Growth

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HP today announced several businesses that have chosen HP BladeSystem over competing offerings to increase hardware utilization, improve energy efficiency and control data center costs.

Customers such as Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama, MRV Engenharia of Brazil and the University of Plymouth in the United Kingdom are among those that have helped HP increase its server blade market share lead. According to fourth calendar quarter 2007 figures released today by industry analyst firm IDC, HP now holds 45.5 percent unit shipment share and 47.7 percent factory revenue share of the $1.2 billion blade server market.⁽¹⁾

These organizations selected HP BladeSystem to address a variety of business objectives, including business continuity, simplified management, increased computing capacity and reduced power and cooling costs.

“These customers had unique business challenges, yet all recognized the cost, time and energy advantages of a bladed infrastructure,” said Mark Potter, vice president, BladeSystem, HP. “The broad adoption of BladeSystem c-Class by customers of all sizes is a credit to the game-changing innovations in form, function and software we’ve built into the architecture.”

Superior infrastructure shapes customer choice

Since its introduction in June 2006, HP BladeSystem has become the blade infrastructure of choice for thousands of businesses. HP now offers the most comprehensive portfolio of any blade system vendor with more than 100,000 possible blade combinations in a single enclosure to match the needs of any customer.

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama (BCBS/AL) is Alabama’s largest healthcare provider and insurer, with more than 3 million customers and more than 4,000 employees. BCBS/AL needed more computing power to manage its current workload plus additional new contracts and services. The company was concerned that adding more physical servers to the 500 it already had would make data center management cumbersome and send power and cooling costs soaring.

BCBS/AL turned to HP to install 48 HP ProLiant BL460c and six HP ProLiant BL480 server blades in HP BladeSystem c3000 and c7000 enclosures. BCBS/AL improved its server utilization by converting to a bladed infrastructure, running 165 virtual machines on HP ProLiant server blades.

In Brazil, MRV Engenharia, the country’s largest real estate developer and home builder, committed to building a world-class data center after its initial public offering in 2007. The company chose HP BladeSystem c7000 enclosures with HP ProLiant and HP Integrity server blades to power a variety of workloads, including corporate enterprise resource planning on an HP Integrity BL860c server blade running Windows® Server 2003/SQL Server 2005. The reliability and small footprint of HP BladeSystem were key attributes for MRV Engenharia, and the company plans to continue to build out its data center with HP technology.

The University of Plymouth turned to HP for the advanced technology it required to meet its performance, flexibility and reliability goals. The HP solution incorporated 30 HP ProLiant BL685 servers with server virtualization. In total, the university has decreased its server count from 280 to 30, reduced the time needed to provision a server from six weeks to 20 minutes and realized energy savings of up to 75 percent.

Growing customer demand fuels market share gains

As a result of growing customer demand for HP BladeSystem, HP increased its blade revenue by 81 percent year over year in its latest fiscal quarter.

HP also led the worldwide blade server market for calendar year 2007, according to IDC’s figures.⁽¹⁾ For the blade market in 2007, HP gained 11.1 percentage points of unit shipment share and 7.5 percentage points in revenue year over year, at the expense of IBM and Dell.

“The server blade market segment continued to grow in 2007 as organizations across the world are increasingly investing in blades as a way to better manage energy costs and simplify IT operations,” said Matthew Eastwood, group vice president, Enterprise Platforms Group, IDC. “HP has maintained its leadership position in the worldwide blade market not only because of the design of c-Class, but also because the company continued to innovate and introduce solutions tailored for new customer segments.”

About HP

HP focuses on simplifying technology experiences for all of its customers – from individual consumers to the largest businesses. With a portfolio that spans printing, personal computing, software, services and IT infrastructure, HP is among the world’s largest IT companies, with revenue totaling $107.7 billion for the four fiscal quarters ended Jan. 31, 2008. More information about HP (NYSE: HPQ) is available at http://www.hp.com.

⁽¹⁾ IDC, Q407 Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, February 2008.

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