Tom Joyce, HP VP of StorageWorks Marketing on HP StorageWorks’ Challenges & Direction

One of the first sessions from the HP StorageWorks Tech Day this week was from Tom Joyce who is the newly appointed Vice President of StorageWorks Marketing at HP.  Tom has a lengthy background in the storage industry, with him working for a number of years at HP’s storage competitor, EMC.

In this informative 50 minute session Tom discusses HP’s intention to lead the storage space by “shaking this thing up” and how HP will be taking their competitors head-on, which is more aggressive in its messaging than we’ve traditionally seen with HP.  Converged infrastructure, as would be expected, was also a key theme. 

He acknowledged many of the challenges facing HP’s StorageWorks in particular HP’s own messaging around storage which hasn’t always been the clearest, which is an issue that I have always felt that HP had struggled with, ie: lots of products but they can’t seem to always piece them together. 

Speaking of ease, making storage simple was also an area that was highlighted as being one of importance for HP moving forward.  There were some good questions from blogger, Chris Evans (@chrismevans) particularly around there currently being little to no consolidation for the management of HP’s different storage systems.

This video is well worth watching if you are a storage customer of HP or are generally interested in enterprise storage.

So it will be interesting to see how and when the key areas of change outlined in this session start to make their way through to HP StorageWorks customers.  HP’s main storage competitors, EMC and NetApp in the meantime will definitely keep HP on their toes especially in this time of considerable technological change in the storage industry.

Disclaimer:  HP have covered my flight, accommodation and some food costs for attending this event.