HP & IBM

Among the various OEM majors two companies stand out for their coverage and above all "offering mix". Each of these two have a hardware business to reckon with, have a software aspiration (or also a software business to reckon with) and each of course is big in the services play.

Let's look at some of the major competitors in each of these categories:

• Hardware : Dell, Sun
• Software : (is a big space depending on where you are looking): Oracle, CA, BMC
• Services : EDS, CSC, Accenture, Offshore based players like TCS, Wipro, Infosys, CTS etc.

This is an interesting situation because their competitors in each of these three distinct categories are also possible alliance partners or sources of size-able revenue for one of the other category.

Both these companies realize that wooing the service providers who also compete with them is also important for their hardware and software business. Thus it is not uncommon to see HP/IBM presenting and sharing technical details of their hardware and software products with these service providers.

This is an interesting relationship! The two companies are competitors for large deals but also need each other though often the hardare vendors seek them more than the other way. In caseses where the service providers encounter mainframes, of course they would then seek IBM for specific inputs.

On their part, HP and IBM talk of how these distinct teams are different and insulated from each other. The sales rep will give some standard explanation of how his colleagues work on the same deal but they don't talk and the whole of IBM/HP till the top is unaware of IBM/HP teams working on the same deal.