When AMD acquired SeaMicro in March, I wrote about how value in the server market was shifting from the server OEMs toward the R&D technology investors that were figuring out ways to add value to the server by designing smaller and more power efficient servers. Well, market leader HP turned in a major quarterly loss of $8.9 billion, owing largely to the $9.2 billion write down related to the 2008 EDS acquisition and softness in PC sales. But in terms of the data center David Chernicoff at ZDNet points out that enterprise server, storage and networking (ESSN) revenue declined 4 percent while Business Critical Systems revenue was down 16 percent. Chernicoff makes the point that as data centers go green and more generally as IT becomes more critical, companies are willing to look at more cutting edge technology solutions, which are being produced by smaller companies. I’d add to Chernicoff’s argument that companies like HP have under invested in R&D and as buying power has been concentrated in fewer major players like Facebook and Google, the buyer has become increasingly sophisticated and much less interested in off the shelf solutions. HP was down over 6 percent in early trading.