HP announced last month that it had hired Donatelli, president of EMC's storage division, to lead a business unit that would encompass servers, networking and storage systems. The move was viewed as a way for HP to strengthen its storage business and better compete with Cisco Systems, which in March announced plans to expand its data center offerings and begin selling blade servers, putting it in competition with server partners like HP, Dell, and IBM. Cisco is partnering with storage vendors like EMC and NetApp to offer a full menu of data center infrastructure systems.
That move by Cisco set the stage for what industry analysts said would be a major battle among large infrastructure vendors looking to sell packages of servers, storage, and networking systems to large enterprises. The recent announcement by Oracle that it will buy Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion added another competitor to the fray.
Donatelli was to have report to Ann Livermore, executive vice president of the Technology Solutions Group at HP. At EMC, Donatelli reported to Joe Tucci, the company's chairman, president, and CEO. Donatelli's storage business contributed about three-fourths of EMC's $14.9 billion in revenue last year. At the time of the announcement, HP also said it was adding its ProCurve Networking business to Donatelli's portfolio.
HP and EMC immediately filed lawsuits against each other and EMC won an order prevent Donatelli from joining HP on May 5 as originally planned. The revised order issued this week seems to have put a temporary halt to that legal dispute.
So, raise your hands if you think that Donatelli won't be giving advice (orders?) to Roberson about future plans for products and strategies for the HP StorageWorks divisions.
