Cisco: HP split is bold and risky

Cisco sales chief Chuck Robbins claims impending split is great for Cisco

HP's "bold" upcoming split poses "great risk" to the firm, according to a top Cisco exec.

At Cisco's Partner Summit in Montreal today, Cisco's senior vice president for worldwide sales Chuck Robbins (pictured) said his firm's channel is set to cash in when HP divides itself up.

In November, HP will split into a printer- and PC-focused company which will retain the HP Inc name, and an HP Enterprise arm which will specialise in hardware and services.

Cisco's Robbins said the division will take a while to happen, which could cause HP problems.

"Certainly, [the HP split] is a bold decision and what I see today, the market is moving so fast that when you make decisions around the structure of your business that can take a year to two years to actually execute, there is great risk," he told CRN in a Q&A session today.

He added that Cisco is paying close attention to the split – as it does to all the goings-on at its competitors.

"We will see how it goes, but we have seen it create more uncertainty in the market for them which has created opportunity for us and our partners," he said.

Robbins added that it is not just tech giants such as HP to which Cisco pays close attention, and said up-and-coming start-ups do not slip from its radar.

Yesterday in his keynote speech, Cisco chief executive John Chambers pointed to the likes of Uber and Netflix as start-ups that revolutionised their industries overnight and urged resellers to think like start-ups to succeed.

Robbins said tech start-ups are a threat to Cisco – as they are to all tech giants – but said Cisco's engineering team creates its own internal startup-style divisions in order to keep up with emerging technology.

"We always have a healthy paranoia about everything going on in the industry," he said.