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Everyone Wants To Be The IBM Of Old: Page 2 of 2

HP, Dell and Oracle are all trying to beef up and offer compute, network, storage--and most significantly--services. HP is furthest down the road, especially after they absorb 3PAR, with solid offerings in all the hardware categories but mainframes and services. Dell is working hard to move up-market, but they're lacking networking and higher end compute resources.  Oracle, IBM and HP offer big Unix systems, but Dell's servers top out at a 4-socket Xeon where HP and IBM have 8-socket or bigger systems even in the Intel server market.

Curiously, IBM has made the transition from being IBM to being a services company that has good hardware for a company's core needs.  Rather than build their own, they OEM mid-range storage from NetApp and LSI. More significantly, they sold their networking division--home of Token Ring--to Cisco, their PC group to Lenovo and disk manufacturing to Hitachi over the past few decades.

If nothing else the IT market is entertaining nowadays, I'll be watching to see how users choose between having that one-size-fits-all and buying best of breed solutions.