HP vs. Cisco: A Data Center Smackdown Looms?

CIO - Despite an overwhelming dominance of the networking business, Cisco has a target painted on its back, in the eyes of Hewlett-Packard.

HP's ProCurve networking unit painted the target there early in the decade, when they began gunning for Cisco, whose strength, analysts say, is built on a history of effective acquisitions and long-term planning-allowing Cisco to build certain leads in virtualization, VoIP, Unified Communications and other hot network-centric technologies before the markets for them are really developed.

"Clients especially recently have come to us asking about alternatives to Cisco," according to says Dave Passmore, network, data center and infrastructure analyst at The Burton Group. "Not because they're unhappy with Cisco; because they're trying to introduce competition into the equation, especially when their budgets are tight."

HP-known traditionally more for high-end servers and professional services than for networking gear-has nevertheless been inching up the list of Cisco networking competitors. HP reached a market share of 5.2 percent during the first quarter of this year for the total worldwide ethernet switch market, compared to Cisco's 69 percent, and a list of also-rans with shares smaller than four percent, according to Dell'Oro Group, which measures revenue, sales volumes and relative market share in a quarterly survey.

A New Push in Virtual Networks and Data Center "We tend to joke about networking as being 'Cisco and the seven dwarfs,'" Passmore says."HP's been making steady progress, though they focus on more the small and mid-sized enterprise and really haven't had as much to track virtual machines as they move from one server to the next, or offer much in networking gear designed specifically to be more suitable to the data center."

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HP is pitching itself as a credible alternative to Cisco in the networking market, and positioning itself to push even harder in the data-center and virtual-infrastructure networking fields.

Next week, at its HP Technology Conference & Expo in Las Vegas, HP will offer 64 sessions that touch on virtualization, and 17 on networking.

It's true HP has focused on 'campus' networking rather than 'enterprise,' but ProCurve-which operated independently and was almost ignored by the rest of HP until it was incorporated into the company's server division last year-is moving up the food chain and starting to compete directly with Cisco for the enterprise, says Ben van Kerkwyk, global product manager in HP ProCurve's data center technology group.

Most recently, in May the group announced a four-year, $180 million deal with Microsoft to produce a set of unified communications and collaboration products designed to compete with Cisco's unified communications products.