Avoiding HP versus Cisco fallout

Garrison: Gird yourselves against further fallout from the HP-Cisco stoush

Anyone in the networking channel will have found it hard to avoid the news that Cisco will not be renewing HP’s reseller contract come 30 April. The long-time technology allies are increasingly competing against one another for business and Cisco has decided that enough is enough.

The fallout clearly has implications for HP itself around its services route to market. Since Cisco introduced its blade server technology in 2009, resellers have faced ongoing disruption and uncertainty over the future of their HP and Cisco offerings, as have the vendors’ customers.

In response to Cisco’s decision, HP has reportedly claimed that history has proven that customers and the market demand both competition and collaboration between IT vendors.

This lack of collaboration cannot be good news from a product support perspective, as many end-user business operations rely on integrated HP and Cisco networks.

For the same reason, it will spell trouble for any resellers making their money selling combined HP and Cisco kit. Ultimately, market demand will suffer if resellers cannot provide guarantees that it is fully future-proof and can be fully supported.

Yet the networking space remains very much the place to be in 2010, with growth opportunities in areas such as 10 Gigabit Ethernet, the datacentre and the rise of cloud services, as well as video application delivery, to name but a few.

With so many enterprises displaying excessive caution around their technology spend, resellers should be taking full advantage of the genuine market opportunities that are out there, and this may not be possible if they are overly reliant on two warring vendors.

Of course, for other resellers in the networking space, the fallout is fantastic news. Providing they have strong credentials, they can capitalise on customer concerns and wade in with their own vendors’ products.

This will in turn benefit end users – already likely to see more competitive offerings from HP as the company makes a bid to go it alone – as they will have more product choice and almost certainly cheaper prices.

For all resellers, now may be the time to scour the market and identify alternative networking products to take on to meet customer requirements and compete effectively – no matter what happens in the next installment of the Cisco versus HP saga.

Steve Garrison is vice president of marketing at Force10 Networks