Affinity Index: x86 Servers

As the year ends, Hewlett-Packard is poised to gain more market share in the SMB x86 server market, an area where solution providers said end customer brand preference and the cost and time it takes to change or add vendors are the most important factors when it comes to closing a sale, according to new research by the Institute for Partner Education & Development (IPED).

HP's market share dominance is evident in the number of deals that solution providers proposed, closed and planned to close this year, according to the study, but the vendor didn't finish first in IPED's new Affinity Index, which measures solution providers' affinity for vendors through 15 factors, each factor weighted individually by the VARs for their importance.

The following slides illustrate some results in the x86 server technology category. ChannelWeb will provide further findings in other product categories throughout December.

In the x86 Server space, IPED found that end customer brand preference and the cost/time to change or add a vendor were the two most important of the 15 factors to solution providers, accounting for 11 percent and 10 percent of the total score, respectively. Meanwhile, a vendor's support of joint sales calls and technical training sessions were chosen as the least valuable, each accounting for only 3 percent of the total score.

While HP dominates the x86 server field in terms of market share, as shown in subsequent slides, it finished second in the Channel Affinity Index, which adds up vendors' scores for all 15 factors. Super Micro's leading total score of 538 suggests that that vendor could be poised to gain market share because VARs like what they're seeing, according to IPED. Still, it has a long way to go. Super Micro's share of channel deals planned to close in the second half of 2008 was just 0.4 percent of all deals, worth $33 million, which compares to HP's Affinity Index score of 528 and $2.97 billion in projected revenue for deals closed in the second half of the year.

Hewlett-Packard's broad success in the face of macroeconomic uncertainty has been well documented by the vendor's recent strong financial statement. In the channel, HP is showing its muscle in the x86 server category. As evidenced in this chart, HP's dollar share of channel-generated x86 server proposals written for the first half was 21.3 percent, with an average transaction size of $13,700. Dell, with a 21.2 percent share, actually had a much higher average transaction size at $23,400, but a lower volume of overall proposals written.

In terms of actually getting customers to sign on the dotted line, HP partners really outpaced their counterparts from Dell, IBM and the rest by reporting a whopping 34.8 percent of dollar value derived from deals closed in the first half of the year.

HP partners expect even more market share growth for the vendor in deals planned to close in the second half of 2008, to the tune of 37.5 percent of projected dollar value.

VARs like Steve Greenberg, president of Thin Client Computing, feel HP is making the right moves with partners.

"It's probably just the quality of HP's builds, with good performance and reliability on both the blades and the stand-alone rack servers. We've had reliability issues and firmware issues with IBM blades. HP also tends to have strong OEM relationships with VMWare and Citrix, the virtualization vendor we predominantly do business with now," Greenberg said.