Some of you may have read with great interest our announcement regarding a new energy management system, called HP Dynamic Smart Cooling, developed by HP Labs. It is designed to deliver 20 to 45 percent savings in cooling energy costs or allow additional equipment to be added to data centers while keeping net power costs constant.
What interested me was the blogging “war” that started after this announcement: it is to my knowledge the first time that all three of us – Dell, IBM and HP – have engaged in a competitive dialogue through blogs. Corporate blogging is clearly taking on a new dimension in 07. Companies are watching what their competitors are doing and commenting on blogs. Dell (Lionel) /IBM (Christopher) – if you pick this up in your blog monitoring, drop me a note. :)
Here is the recap of key events:
November 28: Dan Farber posted on the influential ZDnet “Between the lines” blog a very positive review of our cooling offering, mentioning that “given that HP's customers can model their datacenters to project the level of cost savings from deploying Dynamic Smart Cooling, and HP's primary revenue source is based on delivering cost savings, the sensor and cooling management technology should generate a lot of interest and gain converts”. Between the Lines is ranked # 211 according to Technorati with 6500 links.
November 29: IBM picks up the post and sends an email to Dan Farber with a prepared statement from James Gargan, vice president of System X and Cool Blue at IBM, dissing HP for pre-announcing a product long in advance and claiming to offer similar capabilities. Dan blogs about the email and also btw about the fact that IBM pre-announces too and does not have a similar product or technology concept in its offering.
December 1: Dell is left out of the 2 horse race in the ZDNet post and decides to respond through their corporate blog, linking to Dan’s story, with a post from John Pflueger, Technology Strategist (Nobody in cooling?), promoting their own approach.
It seems like the tech giants have read the excellent Corporate Blogging book by my blogging friend Debbie Weil! It’s ultimately a good thing for customers: companies will use blogs to engage directly with them in an on-going dialogue and share their own unfiltered perspectives.
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