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HP Services Stay Self Centered

Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ) is rounding out the services side of its storage business with five new offerings, as well as an enhanced version of its pay-per-use program for customers of its high-end XP storage arrays (see HP Expands Storage Services).

The new services are more task-oriented than HP's traditional storage consulting services -- and, as one might expect, each one is effectively geared around HP's own storage software and hardware products.

The offerings include storage optimization, intended to improve the utilization of existing storage resources; "data sanitization," which rewrites hard disks to eliminate all traces of their existing data (so it doesn't end up in the wrong hands); data replication; disaster recovery management; and storage area management.

Along with the other major storage vendors, HP in the past couple of years has been putting more resources into professional services, partly in an attempt to offset flat (or declining) product revenues, says Doug Chandler, an analyst at IDC.

"With some of these new services -- like storage optimization -- HP has realized there's a market opportunity there they didn't realize was there before," Chandler says. "But I don't think there's anything groundbreaking here."

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