HP announces new portfolio for SMBs

HP has unveiled a wide range of new products and services designed for small to medium sized businesses (SMBs), including simplified storage kit, printers, laptops, a virtualisation starter bundle and cloud services.

The portfolio is designed to help SMBs during the current economic climate. HP said this market segment is an opportunity, as IT purchases by SMBs are expected to grow by 10 to 12 per cent over the next two years, even with financial constraints.

Tom Yeates, HP's sales director for Small & Medium Business, said that SMBs are "facing the same pain as larger companies", such as cash flow pressures, but often lack the expertise of a fully staffed IT department.

To address this, the new portfolio is "taking HP innovations and wrapping strong solutions around them", he said.

Among the offerings is a number of virtualisation bundles combining HP ProLiant G6 servers with VMware's vSphere, and HP switches, HP LeftHand software and HP's Insight Control suite for management.

"Many small businesses are beginning to virtualise, but you need to share and pool storage as well as servers," said Kyle Fitze, director of HP's StorageWorks products.

The bundles provide virtual shared SAN storage without the need for external SAN storage arrays, according to Fitze, helping to speed the adoption of virtualisation in smaller firms.

HP also said that channel partners will be able to offer HP Insight Remote Support to SMB customers, remotely monitoring systems to fix developing problems before a failure occurs.

New storage products provide unified storage so that SMBs do not have to maintain separate storage for file and application data, according to HP.

The StorageWorks X1000 and X3000 arrays provide file de-duplication, and can be clustered together for high availability. HP also added StorageWorks 2000 G2 modular smart arrays that can cram in up to 99 small form factor drives.

HP also unveiled its own cloud services, whereby existing HP resellers will be able to offer hosted applications such as Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint and Dynamics CRM.

The services will typically be offered on a monthly subscription basis, according to HP, eliminating the need for upfront capital expenditure and converting applications to an operating expense.

HP's new print products, meanwhile, consist of a new mono laser, the Laserjet 3015, the colour OfficeJet 6000 with a wireless interface and duplex print support; and the wide-format OfficeJet 7000 that prints A3 pages.

Also included in the new SMB portfolio are the recently announced HP ProBook laptops and 4410t mobile workstation.

SMB customers will have access to flexible leasing and financing options from HP to help them deploy the IT solutions they require, the company said.