HP OEMs AppIQ SRM

Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ) will replace its aging OpenView Storage Area Manager software through an OEM deal with startup AppIQ Inc.

(see HP Upgrades SRM Software).

HP today announced it will sell AppIQs storage resource management (SRM) software as part of a seven-year deal that will include collaboration with the startup on future development. HP will rebrand AppIQ’s software as HP Storage Essentials beginning March 28.

HP follows Engenio Information Technologies Inc., Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) (NYSE: SGI), and Sun Microsystems Inc. in signing OEM and development deals with AppIQ (see AppIQ & Engenio Join for Software, Sun Shines on AppIQ, and HDS Expands Software, Services).

Rich Escott, HP’s director of management software, says HP will continue to sell OpenView Storage Area Manager for at least 18 months and support it for three years, but admits AppIQ’s Storage Authority software has features lacking in HP’s current offering.

The AppIQ features that sold HP are automatic provisioning and support for industry standards that makes AppIQ software a good fit for heterogeneous storage networks (see AppIQ Tackles Provisioning).AppIQ wrote its software around the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) Common Information Model (CIM), which has gained interest for storage management software, despite initial skepticism on the part of some observers (see AppIQ Has a Clue). Embracing those standards gives AppIQ an advantage, at least in perception, over rivals such as CreekPath Systems Inc., Softek Storage Solutions Inc., and Veritas Software Corp. (Nasdaq: VRTS) as an OEM partner.

“OpenView lacks auto provisioning, and that’s the type of thing we want to take advantage of,” Escott says. “OpenView is six years old, it uses proprietary integration into APIs. Now we can leverage AppIQ’s support of new standards.”

Most SRM vendors offer provisioning, except for Softek -- which says it discovered that customers don’t want it (see SRM Takes Software Center Stage). And all leading SRM vendors now support SMI-S. So what makes AppIQ stand out?

One industry consultant acknowledges AppIQ's leadership in provisioning and management, but he says the HP deal might have been a marriage of convenience, too. He thinks HP picked AppIQ because Hitachi already uses AppIQ's software, and HP resells Hitachi’s high-end storage systems.

“The perception is that AppIQ has the most complete SMI-S support and significant extensions as well as support for storage that does not yet support SMI-S,” says the consultant, who asked not to be named. “It is also perceived that their auto-provisioning tool is pretty straightforward. But my assessment on why they went with AppIQ is because that is the standard for Hitachi and they are a big Hitachi OEM. It was an easy decision to just pick AppIQ. The rest is the cognitive dissonance that follows the decision.”HP Storage Essentials will sit on top of HP System Insight Manager, its server management platform. Escott says much of the ongoing development work between HP and AppIQ will involve further integrating AppIQ’s architecture with System Insight. The integration of storage and server management software is part of HP’s utility computing initiative.

The new SRM software will be available across all of HP’s SAN and NAS storage systems. It will be part of a much-needed facelift of HP storage, which has been one of the company’s top priorities (see HP Stays Hopeful on Storage, HP Storage Slammed, and HP Plots Storage Comeback). Poor performance by the storage division is believed to be one of the factors that led HP to ask CEO Carly Fiorina to resign two weeks ago (see HP Plots New Course).

Despite its loss of market share recently, however, HP still represents by far the largest potential installed base among AppIQ's OEM partners and could accelerate the startup's drive for profitability. HP’s networked storage market share is twice as large as the combined share of AppIQ’s two other largest OEM partners, Hitachi and Sun, according to the latest figures from IDC. AppIQ CEO Dave Lemont says his company has about 150 customers, mostly through OEM deals.

Where does AppIQ go from here? “There are other people to talk to,” says Lemont, although nothing appears imminent. “Obviously, this [HP deal] has been taking up most of our time.” Prospects such as Network Appliance Inc. (Nasdaq: NTAP) or Storage Technology Corp. (StorageTek) (NYSE: STK) remain untapped by AppIQ.

— Dave Raffo, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch0