Upping The Big Data Ante: HP Creates Converged Systems Unit

HP said the new organization will bring together what it called "dedicated resources to deliver purpose-built technology for social, cloud, mobile and big data solutions."

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In addition, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based computer giant said it is merging its two separate server businesses into a $14 billion group named HP Servers in a bid to "increase the speed of transformation of the server industry and drive profitable growth."

The new big data organization, referred to as the HP Converged Systems business unit, brings together a wide variety of resources to deliver big data "converged application appliances," including systems based on Apache Hadoop, HP Vertica, SAP HANA and HP Cloud System.

The Converged Systems unit will be led by Tom Joyce, formerly vice president of marketing, strategy and operations for storage at HP.

Joyce, named senior vice president and general manager of the Converged Systems unit, was at one time the CEO of Akorri, a startup software company specializing in virtualization. Before that, he was a vice president of marketing, product management and business development at EMC.

The new HP Servers group, which merged the HP Business Critical Systems and HP Industry Standard Servers groups, will be led Mark Potter, who currently heads the Industry Standard Servers group.

HP Executive Vice President and General Manager Dave Donatelli said the Converged Systems unit will accelerate "the pace of innovation" for HP as it moves to win the big data converged infrastructure battle.

"HP was the first to announce Converged Infrastructure, which each major technology company has since followed," said Donatelli in a prepared statement. "Today's organizational updates are the next logical step as we accelerate the delivery of game-changing converged systems technology."

The HP restructuring comes with the big data battle heating up. Just last week, the new EMC-VMware-General-Electric-backed Pivotal was formally launched to attack the big data market opportunity.

Pivotal includes 1,400 employees from EMC and VMware along with key big data technology from the two vendors, all aimed at delivering an industry-standard big data services platform. Pivotal has committed to a fourth-quarter release of Pivotal 1.0, a complete, "next-generation enterprise platform as a service."

PUBLISHED APRIL 29, 2013