HP looks to muscle Apple out of the enterprise market

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HP sees massive opportunity to grow its workstation portfolio, with the firm looking to take advantage of the uncertainty surrounding Dell and Apple's perceived failure to support business users.

Jeff Wood, project manager for the Workstation business, suggested multiple reasons why HP is specifically after Apple's enterprise customers.

"Apple's fallen short of certifying professional graphics. They've always done consumer graphics, whether its Radeon or GeForce based, but they never went to the professional side," he told IT Pro.

"That combined with them taking professional features out of their software like Final cut Pro and making their products more dedicated to consumer folks, who just want to use Garage Band, [means] they've alienated the professional market."

Wood is confident HP will be able to take advantage of this Apple misstep with the latest generation of ZBook and Z Workstation products.

"Our hot-rod Z820 workstation is capable of supporting up to 512GB of internal memory, 14TB of internal storage, high-end Quadro graphics from Nvidia and Thunderbolt," Wood continued.

"All those guys hugging their Mac Pros forever are gonna go wait a minute' I can go with Apple with only one processor forcing me into AMD FirePro graphics and no internal expandability - or HP, where I can get this full expandable box, accomplish my tasks and be far more productive than with Apple."

HP is going to make a concerted effort to woo Mac Pro and MacBook users with special promotions over the coming months in the UK, he revealed.

"We're putting together campaigns to target those Apple users you're going to specifically see in the UK we're got five different locations where we're going to offer Apple users and resellers promotions to switch from their Pro to Z620 and Z820 products for video production, audio production and broadcast video, because that's where Apple's target has been."

"[Apple is] running about 60 65,000 units a quarter of Mac Pros. Even if we take five per cent of that install baseover the next two years, that market share number will grow as a percentage of the overall business. It's the biggest opportunity for expansion we can see."

Khidr Suleman is the Technical Editor at IT Pro, a role he has fulfilled since March 2012. He is responsible for the reviews section on the site  - so get in touch if you have a product you think might be of interest to the business world. He also covers the hardware and operating systems beats. Prior to joining IT Pro, Khidr worked as a reporter at Incisive Media. He studied law at the University of Reading and completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Magazine Journalism and Online Writing at PMA Training.