Cisco mocks 'scorned ex-lover' HPE at Partner Connection Week, while going after Palo Alto Networks and Nutanix
Networking giant targets Palo Alto and Nutanix with sales promos, while swiping at HPE over Hurricane Harvey supply chain problems
Cisco opened its Partner Connection Week in the Bahamas by swiping at three of its competitors and announcing promotions for partners to go after the trio's market share.
The networking giant announced offers for the channel to compete with Palo Alto Networks and Nutanix, and also took a dig at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) for its supply chain issues.
In his keynote, Cisco VP Nirav Sheth mocked HPE for attributing $93m of losses to Hurricane Harvey's impact last year, after the natural disaster struck a manufacturing facility in Houston.
Sheth said that, using its own multi-cloud infrastructure, Cisco was able to mitigate the effect of Hurricane Harvey by rerouting its supply chain to other facilities around the world - something he claimed HPE failed to do.
"From a business perspective we had a major datacentre manufacturing facility right there in Houston and we were really concerned with what was happening and that we'd have to shut down," he said. "That would disrupt our ability to serve customers and ultimately disrupt our revenue.
"But because of the secure intelligent platform for digital business that we had invested in we had the right supplier collaboration capabilities and the right SAP Hana capability running on a multi-cloud architecture in instances around the world. We were able to quickly flip the switch and reroute our supply chain and recover that supply capacity at other sites around the world, and our customer deliveries were not disrupted.
"Well our good friends down the street in Cupertino - maybe not good friends, maybe a scorned ex-lover - HPE were manufacturing in the same facility and guess what they had to report on their quarterly earnings?" he said. "£93m of a loss attributed to supply chain disruptions because of Hurricane Harvey."
Sheth then asked the audience of partners to raise their hands if they are "proudly selling HPE", only to be met with laughter as nobody obliged.
"The reason I'm saying this is because you should sell them Cisco multi cloud - and you can use the HPE compete promo as you sell into HPE, how about that?" he quipped.
Later on in his keynote Sheth took a dig at the "one-trick ponies" that Cisco is competing with across a range of technologies, before announcing a series of "competitive promotions" to target two specific vendors.
"I really like our strategy because when I look around the industry everybody else that we're having to compete against are one-trick ponies," he said. "One of my favourite one-trick ponies is Palo Alto Networks."
To target Palo Alto these promos will be for next-generation firewalls and email security, while Nutanix will be targeted with a hyper-convergence offer.
Sheth did not go into the specifics of the offerings - only to say that they will be available in Cisco's Q4 and will "bring [partners'] pricing to where it needs to be".