A Springboard To Services

Earlier this year HP took over the mantle of the largest IT company in the world in terms of revenue from IBM, and look set to be the first IT vendor to break $100B in revenue per fiscal year. However, true to form for HP they are not making a lot of noise about it. This is in my view due to a range of reasons, including the natural reticence to make noise that is perhaps at times too strong in the HP character, the fact that with a significant acquisition IBM could regain the mantle of largest IT company and of course revenue is not the only measure of the largest provider.
For the record the largest vendors in terms of various measures are below :

Revenue – HP

Employees – IBM 

Profitability – Microsoft

Market Capitalization – Microsoft

There of course other measures one could use, but that is not the basis of this exercise. This information did get me thinking about comparisons between the two companies in terms of the way they go about their PR and corporate communications. Clearly HP is very strong in this regard in the consumer space, but in terms of enterprise computing it is much more of a laggard in comparison with IBM. Even if the actual offerings arguably have not always fulfilled potential IBM has been very deliberate in ensuring that through strong corporate communication they are able to be the agenda setters and develop their executives as brands in their own right. HP on the other hand has a culture of the product over personality in terms of managing the profile of executives.

So where did this lead to, in short I used Google to have a look at the hits for various leadership members for both firms, the CEO, AP CEO and Australian and Canadian MD’s. This is shown below

What it highlights that apart from Mark Hurd, in terms of visibility in communications, the relevant regional IBM executive hold a clear advantage in terms of media profile and coverage. The reason I feel for the increased presence of Mark Hurd is a combination of his natural profile and the corporate governance issues that HP faced last year which challenged the notion of “no such thing as bad publicity”. Also for him HP’s much improved fiscal performance has also helped. Also with some executives on either side being relatively new to roles, there is little insight gained from the tenure aspect of the analysis.

When I looked at the breakdown from a geographical point of view, the value in IBM and their publicity machine becomes clear. Whilst HP is a more modest company perhaps, a critical by product of IBM’s media success has been that they are able to identify as a local, i.e. Australian, Canadian or even Chinese company than HP. This provides significant implicit benefits for them.

HP have identified that their enterprise marketing and communications needs some work to fulfill potential. It will be interesting to see what cultural changes Shane Robison is able to make to this part of HP, it needs to be substantial to ensure that HP can get the executive profiles expected of a company of its size. Whilst Google hits are not the only metric to use by any stretch of the imagination, it provides some insight for IBM’s strong perception in the enterprise space and an opportunity for HP to grow their mindshare in addition to market share.