Scarlet Pruitt of IDG News Service already wrote a comprehensive story on HP’s information lifecycle management strategy, but I wanted to make a few comments.This strategy, and others like it, are interesting to look at as an admission that customers are no longer happy with buying only a storage box. They clearly want services. SANs are no longer new and nobody has money to buy one on curiosity alone. In fact, virgin SAN customers are few and far between. So these services are aimed at those who own SANs already but are fed up that they aren’t getting value out of them. The eight partners HP announced are companies HP had worked with before. Clearly they just decided it makes more sense to formalize the relationship and then have HP test, verify, implement, and support the solutions they were al-ready building on top of HP’s gear. I spoke with Rusty Smith, the owner of this effort at HP, about this strategy and he explained this arrangement benefits all. The customer get HP’s guarantee, the partners gain credibility by virtue of working with HP, and HP gets new customers. Smith also told me HP is considering packaging some of these co-developed so-lutions. He also said this program is different from EMC’s because HP is a systems company. In other words, HP knew all along it wasn’t just about arrays, but rather business processes. Smith points out that data is not created by storage, but by applications. He also noted that HP has tape offerings to go with its disk products- something EMC does not have. And I think if you are talking lifecycle management, you better be telling customers how they are going to get their data onto tape. Technology Industry