HP beats Sun to SAP upgrade for AstraZeneca

Stan Beer
Tuesday, 20 September 2005 20:12

IT Industry - Deals

The war of words between HP and Sun continues with HP Australia lauding it over its high-end server hardware rival in a $450,000 deal with pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca.

The deal includes delivery, implementation and three year maintenance on a range of HP Integrity rx2600 and rx4640 servers using Intel® Itanium2® processor technology. The Integrity servers have been bought to both cope with past and future AstraZeneca expansion and to ensure that the company could take full advantage of the functionality of its upcoming SAP ECC5 upgrade.

Michael Dennis, AstraZeneca Australia IS manager, said, “We were already spending somewhere in the region of $190,000 a
year on maintenance for our servers. HP’s recommendation of a total of five Itanium2 based servers, including maintenance for three years, made the kind of financial sense that couldn’t be ignored. The whole system will have paid for itself in maintenance alone in less than two and a half years.”

Initially the offer to tender was also taken up by Sun, but says Dennis, the Sun offering didn’t cover what AstraZeneca needed, and instead offered something that could only be provided sometime in the future.

“We were speaking with the two vendors about this at the end of 2004. The reason this is relevant here is that HP was offering us Itanium, a technology that had already been tried and tested in the market place and proved extremely worthy. Sun on the other hand was offering us technology that hadn't been tested, and as far as we were able to ascertain wasn't even in general release yet. This made making the right choice relatively straightforward for us," said Dennis.

Well Sun, are you going to take that laying down?