HP Hit Cisco First, Not the Other Way Round.

One issue that has cropped up as part of the Cisco Unified Computing announce­ment is that pun­dits are claim­ing Cisco is attack­ing their part­ners HP by mov­ing into the server space. However I can’t shake the feel­ing that its the other way around.

HP setup the ProCurve net­work divi­sion some­time ago. More recently it would seem that the ProCurve mar­ket­ing have been switch­ing Cisco accounts to ProCurve, espe­cially at the edge of the eth­er­net net­work by using their incum­bent status with cus­tom­ers. Basically, the ProCurve team are for­cing HP Sales Teams and Account Managers to sell ProCurve instead of Cisco. This is hap­pen­ing at a low intens­ity, very quietly on the ground, which is why many ana­lysts are not aware of it.

Combine that with HP blade serv­ers that have their own net­work­ing and there is not much space left for Cisco to par­ti­cip­ate. It’s not too much of step from this to devel­op­ing some core switches and HP becomes a major competitor.

Therefore, I think HP hit Cisco first. The marko-​​bitch-​​slap-​​fest will con­tinue unabated of course and every­one will accuse Cisco of tak­ing on HP because they came right out and did it. HP gets to whine that he hit me first because they were skulk­ing around when no-​​one was looking.

Revenue Protection

HP des­per­ately wants to pro­tect the rev­enue they get from selling Cisco equip­ment until they decide to announce their next-​​generation of Data Centre switches, prob­ably in the next twelve months. HP is major reseller of Cisco hard­ware, and makes a lot of money in pro­fes­sional ser­vices (which is the real money maker) from integ­ra­tion. Most import­antly, it gives HP full own­er­ship of the cus­tomer rela­tion­ship and makes sure that HP can con­trol the cus­tomer closely (which is how they like it).

Why twelve months? It was no big secret that Cisco was build­ing serv­ers and HP should have found out about a year ago. It takes about a two years to bring a product to mar­ket, logic­ally, HP will announce their net­work­ing strategy early next year.

There is no point on spec­u­lat­ing on what it will look like except to say that it will be some­thing like the Cisco Nexus 7000 — lots of 10G Ethernet and sup­port for DCB /​ CEE. I sus­pect that the early ver­sion will be a lim­ited fea­ture set. This will be able to back­bone the cur­retn ProCurve edge switches as well form a Data Centre strategy. Albeit with a lot less features.

I say, bring it on.

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