Users Praise Workstation Quality

While Hewlett-Packard’s recent elevation to the top of the workstation market is an impressive accomplishment that’sbeen a long time in coming, it probably hasn’t come as a completesurprise to those folks who’ve been working on HP workstationsfor years in technical computing and entertainment applications.

“We standardized on HP workstations five or six yearsago,” says Rich Moore, assistant vice president of IT at Art Institutes, a schoolspecializing in electronic media and arts and one of HPs biggestworkstation customers, with more than 2500 machines installed in 23college locations. “We looked at HP and all their competitors atthe time, and we just felt theyhad a good plan for product development. This is a company with ahistory. It’s a company that’s been around a long time andthat will be around for a long time.

“Moreover, their workstations do the job. We put a seriousbeatings on these machines,” he adds. “We have 1000s of newusers beating on these machines every day, seven days a week, 20 hoursa day doing the most demanding applications. And they just holdup.”

Similarly, Erik Noteboom, director of education of the digital artsat Full Sail Real WorldEducation, an entertainment technology institution in Orlando, sayshis school’s been using HP workstations for three-and-half years,and he’s been equally impressed.

“Why’d we go with HP? Well, first of all, from aphilosophy point of view, HP is probably the leading company that ispaying attention to digital video and high-end graphics,” saysNoteboom. “Now I’m not saying that companies like Dellcan’t do it, but they tend to have a more relaxed approach, inthat they’ll say ‘if you configure the machine, I’llbuild it for you.’ But HP is much more proactive. They make ittheir business to build a machine so that it can actually handledigital video or 3D animation. And that attracted me.”

The similarities between these two HP customers are many. Both havebeen long-time users of both HP Kayak and Visualize workstations, andboth put their HP machines into grueling environments where they areused nearly 24/7 by students working in every kind of DCC applicationfrom high-end 3D animation to Web design to video production. Likewise,both have nothing but praise not only for the quality of the HPhardware but for the quality of HP’s customer service.

“Because we run our lab 24/7,” says Noteboom,“it’s critical that we have workstations that are reliable.Since I come from the Irix/Unix world, to me NT workstations seem veryunreliable in general. But the HP workstations have really proved theycan handle it. I mean, we’ll have one go down every once in awhile, but compared to some other NT workstations we’ve had inhere, it’s not even close.”

Reliability is a theme that Moore heartily echoes. “The HPmachines are fast and they’re efficient,” he says.“We have very few issues with dead-on-arrival machines ormachines that die in the lab. Basically they just go out there and run.In fact, we’re still running machines that we’ve had foryears.”

Just as important as the hardware performance, says Moore, has beenHP’s own customer support. “We’ve always had greatservice from them,” he says. “Whenever we’ve had anissue with a particular application running with a particular card, HPwas wonderful in running those problems down and solving them. And theyhave been ever since.”

Naturally, such comments are music to the ears of Jeff Wood,HP’s product marketing manager for personal workstations. But, heinsists, they are not unusual comments. HP, he says, has built itsreputation on being able to build trusted solutions and provide qualitycustomer support.

“The key to our reliability,” he says, “is ourrelationships with our ISVs. We go out of our way to garner theirsupport and work directly with them while we are developing the boxes.We certify their applications and we do a lot more qualification withthe customer environments so we know we can trust our solutions goinginto it.”
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