HP has launched a range of products and services aimed at the small and medium business market, taking in storage, cloud computing initiatives, new business laptops and printing solutions.
Tom Yeats, director of partner sales, told a press briefing that it saw the SMB market as a great opportunity, and that its products would provide SMBs with an opportunity for growth. Yeats said HP's new products would help SMBs "do more with less," as they react to the challenges of the current economic climate.
HP highlighted that SMBs are facing large challenges dealing with large amounts of email and the increased use of digital media. To cater for this HP is offering its StorageWorks X1000 and X3000, NAS solutions enhanced with deduplication features, though it admitted that these were a rebrand of its Proliant Storage Servers.
The new StorageWorks 2000i and 2000sa G2 are modular SAN arrays that support small form factor 2.5in iSCSI and SAS drives, which due to their size increase storage capacity per unit of rack space by 33 per cent and according to HP, reduce power consumption by up to 50 per cent.
HP is also introducing a virtualisation bundle' which includes an HP server, storage and networking equipment and virtualisation software from HP and VMware.
Kyle Fitze, StorageWorks marketing director for storage platforms, said that this would jumpstart' the ability of small and medium business to employ virtualisation.
Luis Casado, marketing director for printers, said that as part of the SMB focus, HP would be expanding its trade-in program, encouraging businesses to purchase newer printers. Casado referred to the new Laserjet P3015 as a war horse', with a 42ppm print speed and a monthly print volume of up to 5,000 pages.
Also introduced is the Officejet 6000 series, which at 99 is HP's most affordable business inkjet printer and the Officejet 7000, a 249 wide format device enabling companies to print in A3.
HP also announced a partnership with Coweb, a hosted Microsoft exchange service provider. The intention is to enable value added resellers in the channel to offer customised cloud based computing to SMBs. Yeats said that this approach would allow SMBs to work with their own trusted channel partners, and this will enable resellers to, "target and tune their offerings".
Finally, on the product side, HP is introducing its ProBook S-series, a line of notebooks built specifically for the SMB market. These features a high gloss finish, a choice of colours, LED backlighting and 16:9 displays.
