By William Fellows
Qwest Communications Inc chose Hewlett-Packard Co to be the primary equipment supplier to its application hosting business because we like to choose predators, chairman and CEO Joseph Nacchio told ComputerWire. He said HP clearly has a lot to prove, ground to make up, is hungry for success and wants to be number one. He said he had to nudge down by a peg or two the forecasted revenue opportunity of its recent storage deal with HP to $1.5bn. HP had been talking it up. He emphasized the deals it has struck for HP equipment are not exclusive. Nacchio said Qwest sold out the capacity in its San Jose, California facility in 13 days.
Meantime HP said it is certainly true that it didn’t meet storage rival EMC Corp in the Qwest deal. Contrary to EMC’s claims that it didn’t bid on the deal because it effectively meant giving kit away, HP says EMC were qualified out early on and didn’t even make the short list, that was down to HP and Compaq. The business terms are great, as are the hundreds of millions of dollars of storage business they didn’t even get a sniff at.
