HP RISS? ILM and paving a way to future storage... | Computerworld Blogs:

"...the thing I need from HP is the information to be able to engage HP solution sets beyond the level of a hardware manufacturer. But I can't seem to do this without multiple vendor visits and lots of talking. That's not good enough for me - why can't you present your ILM solutions in detailed and comprehensive information that's readily accessible?"

Like the author, my day-job is a heavy HP shop. My quote, of a couple of weeks ago was "Let's go with a Single vendor strategy, we'll avoid incompatibility issues!. HA!"

Unfortunately (and I believe this applies to all large, multi-system vendors, not just HP - but, they're my vendor, so they get my moans), the reality seems to be that with the likes of HP, you don't have a large vendor. Instead, you have many smaller vendor-bubbles which don't seem to talk to each other much and pay a bit of lip-service to being one company. There seems to be very little information shared between the little bubbles - almost like they were separate companies. The SAN people don't walk to the backup people. The backup software people don't talk to the server people. No-one seems to talk to the sales people. The support people always seem vaguely surprised that you expect them to have access to even a little bit of information about what you've bought.

The only benefit we really see from our single-vendor strategy is the ability to swing a bit more leverage on pricing.