Welcome to the wacky world of IT news.  We had high hopes that we'd have a few minutes of open air time on Monday to tell the world about the BladeSystem Matrix.  Thank you very much Mr. Ellison for sucking the air out of the room.

Now that the Oracle/Sun news is taking a breath, I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge some folks who paid attention and to add some other thoughts about why Matrix is important.

First, a tip of the hat to Gordon Haff for listening. 

His article A Matrix of HP Blades, tells me that he gets what is most important about Matrix.  Is Matrix important because of innovation?  Yes.  But most of the innovations came to market in the last 6 to 24 months. Only Virtual Connect Flex-10 and the update to Virtual Connect 8Gb FC are brand-spanking new on April 20th.  Is Matrix about integration?  Most certainly.  It may not sound sexy, but it was the old-fashioned heavy-lifting to integrate Matrix within the standards and investments in data centers around the world that make it stand out.  Finally, is Matrix about execution?  More than any thing else.  In fact, the HP blade strategy is ALL about execution. That means delivering the innovations we promise and the integration that our customer expect. 

The fact is, this is a long race. HP is in it for the long haul.  Declaring that you change the game with a press release just doesn't make it so.  It's all about "show me", not chest thumping, back-slapping or peacocking.  Sometimes, it just takes a committment and a lot of hard-work behind the scenes to take innovation, make is simple to integrate and then to actually deliver it.  The Steve Jobs launch keynote aside, the iPOD wasn't a game-changing innovation.  It was the integration and execution that did that.

You see, BladeSystem Matrix is all about enhancement and integration into what you have today. In fact, I’ll let you in on a little secret.  There are no new standards or requirements to overhaul your network and storage equipment with Matrix. Inside is standard Ethernet, but with 4 to 1 consolidation of equipment, 10Gb performance and the ability to fine-tune that bandwidth to your application needs. Regular Fibre Channel is inside, but with 65 percent less equipment costs and 8Gb speeds.  Proven management is there too, but kicked up with accurate capacity advice and planning, power-aware provisioning, disaster recovery, an automated workflow engine and a slick, self-service portal to deploy applications fast based on templates you design.  It also supports familiar Integrity or ProLiant blade server models and all your OS’s, hypervisors and applications without touching the code. 

All we did with BladeSystem Matrix was take the time to improve the integration of these technologies to deliver to you a better infrastructure that simply works the way you would expect it to, what what you have today.  All of the capabilities inside have been proven over the last few years in real-world, production environments.  You don’t need to rethink or re-engineer your architectures, team roles or IT processes.  Matrix simply helps you make what you have in place now, more effective and efficient.   If you don't notice all the cool stuff and complex engineering it took to deliver simplicity, you won't hurt our feelings.   

Finally, that work to integrate makes the BladeSystem Matrix ridiculously simple to buy, deploy and expand so you don’t have to deal with the complexity of all the moving parts. The job of integration, setup and installation is all on us. BladeSystem Matrix is delivered as one platform, in one box that scales to up to 1000 nodes in a single, managed domain.  That means you’re up and operating fast, not spending weeks putting the puzzle together. 

Now, for the comments that Matrix is a "response to Cisco."  I can assure you, this level of integration didn't happen between March 13 and April 20.  For those that are paying attention, since the launch of BladeSystem c-Class in June of 2006, every step of innovation, integration and execution has been leading to Matrix.  Cisco's in good company with a lot of other vendors that continue to look for a way to respond to that long line of innovation from Virtual Connect and Flex-10 to Thermal Logic technology and Insight Dynamics-VSE.  Matrix is just raising the bar set by HP over the last three years.

If you already knew all of that, thanks for paying attention.