SOFTWARE BIZ TO PUT HP IN GOOD STEAD

Source: DNA

Bill Chambers, founder president, LeftHand Networks, loves mangoes. Not surprising as the serial entrepreneur's first venture as a teenager was peddling the fruit in the neighbourhood in South Florida. He went on to set up four startups and sold one of them to General Electric. Then he set up LeftHand Networks, a company that developed the industry's first IP-based storage area network (IP-SAN) solution. He sold off the nine-year-old company to Hewlett Packard in a $360 million deal late last year. That HP went on to pay up the agreed price despite the crash in valuations all round, speaks volumes of the company's value proposition. Chambers has now settled for a full time engagement with HP as vice-president, StorageWorks Division. He spoke on the value that LeftHand brought to HP and the latter's future in software.

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How is the integration process between LeftHand and HP going on and how long will it take?

One of the things that I give HP a lot of credit for is that they are good at integrating. I was a serial entrepreneur prior to this, I sold my business to General Electric, and I can say they know what they are doing. It's a year-long process and what HP is doing is to ensure that they get the returns on investment. We have quite a large team dedicated to it looking at the entire spectrum.

Considering that it paid the agreed valuation for LeftHand despite the economic slowdown, the company you set up should be having a compelling proposition for HP. Why is LeftHand so important for HP?

The importance of LeftHand to HP is on several counts. The first is that it fills in a key hole we had in the product portfolio. At HP, we had a gap and we were trying to stretch our EDA product down and stretch our MSA product up. But more importantly, when you look at it from the growth perspective, HP did not have a good product to capitalise on the new emerging market that LeftHand had pioneered, which is referred to as IP SAN. That is the fastest growing segment today. HP did not have a solution and LeftHand did. And that is what brought us to the table. Another thing that I will share with you is that unlike many solutions that use custom silicon and a lot of specialty components inside, our solution leverages industry standard components as a result of which our gross revenues are very high, almost one and half or two times.

HP has a lot of proprietary technologies and opens standards may not fit in always. Your take on this.

We see that there is a big opportunity for HP to sell services. The biggest trend today is server and storage virtualisation. Now HP has all the services to help customers do it and deploy server and storage virtualisation, for both small and large clients. So, the key element in a competitive landscape is that customers are looking into entering next generation data centre technologies. They are stepping back and realising that what has worked for them till now, may not work in the future. So from HP's point of view pushing traditional systems may not actually work. That is where we come in with our open standard expertise.