If you haven’t read my first post on HP Networking, you can read it here. I covered the marketing aspect of it. In this second post, I wanted to talk about the technical approach that HP is taking. However, there was so much information that was mentioned prior to the technical networking talk, that I couldn’t cover it all in the first post. Therefore, this post will be more marketing type content. Sorry for those of you who hate marketing, but at least I have no slide deck to torture you with.
Let me give you a rundown of the 4 different speakers we listened to from HP. I probably should have covered this in the first post. I mention these people just to let you know how much information we had to consume within the several hours HP presented to us. If you want to see the presentations I saw in person at HP’s Executive Briefing Center, you can watch the videos below. It’s 3 hours worth of content between the 2 videos!
Video 1 – Overall HP Strategy with Frances Guida – Start to 31:25.
Next Generation Data De-Duplication with Jeff DiCorpo – 32:15 to the end of the video.
Video 2 – Overall HP Networking Strategy with Jay Mellman – Start to 23:55.
In Depth Technical Discussion on HP Networking with Jeff Kabul – 24:20 to the end of the video.
Throughout the presentations from HP, you REALLY get the feeling that they only look at Cisco as their competition. Everything was framed in the context of pulling share away from Cisco, or doing things better than Cisco. In light of that, it was no surprise when Jay Mellman mentioned that all of HP’s 6 main data centers were Cisco free. I think they are really proud of that fact, and maybe they should be. Is there any better way to show your customers, or potential customers, that you are serious about your networking products than to “eat your own dog food” in your production environment?
Then, it got REALLY interesting. Jay alluded to a recent Gartner report entitled “Debunking the Myth of the Single-Vendor Network” in which Gartner states that it is cheaper to have more than one vendor supply your network gear. Jay mentioned that Cisco got people very lazy about correct network design and that by bringing in a second vendor, it forces an organization to do proper network design. I am going to assume that was a reference to some of the proprietary things Cisco has developed like EIGRP and HSRP.
One of the delegates, Tom Hollingsworth(@networkingnerd), asked Jay what the difference was between proper network design and lazy network design. Tom mentioned that ProCurve had historically been edge centric and that perhaps HP felt that switching decisions should be made closer to the edge as opposed to Cisco who puts more emphasis on the core. Jay stated that Cisco does that because they make a lot more money selling core switches than they do edge switches. According to Jay, when it comes to Cisco pushing core switching, quote: “It is as much a business model as it is an architectural model.”
HP believes they have a better approach to architecture than Cisco. Maybe they feel that way when compared to the other networking vendors, but again, I get the feeling they are only interested in being better than Cisco. They also believe people are going to do more evaluation than they have in the past.
HP realizes they aren’t going to hit a bunch of home runs and get forklift upgrades from Cisco to HP. They are just looking to get a foot in the door. Maybe they will win a few deals outright, but for the most part, they will have to squeeze their way into Cisco dominated networks piece by piece. BMW was a good example for them. What started out as a small wireless project in a few dealerships blew up into HP getting a piece of the BMW enterprise infrastructure. HP isn’t the only vendor to work the “foot in the door” angle. I’ve talked to several networking vendors in the past year and they are all trying this approach. Get a box or two in the datacenter or on the edge and slowly grow their presence over time. To me, that’s the best strategy. Let an organization get comfortable with you. Then, when there’s a problem and a vendor like Cisco cannot solve it, you get to ride in on the white horse and save the day with your product that CAN solve the problem.
With all of this talk of HP believing they did things better than Cisco, an opportunity to ask HP about voice, or unified communications came up and I took it. I asked Jay if HP was going to do anything in the realm of voice. Granted, they have an existing product from 3Com entitled VCX, but in light of HP’s increasing relationship with Microsoft around unified communications, I didn’t have a good feel for what HP was going to do. The voice/UC offering from Cisco is pretty solid from a stability and feature standpoint, so it would be harder for HP to chip away at that sector than it would be in the realm of switching.
HP has decided they don’t want to be in the voice business long term. Jay indicated that with unified communications(ie voice), it is, and I quote: “bifurcating into applications and infrastructure”. Kudos to Jay for using an obscure word like “bifurcating“. To be quite honest, I had to look it up. 🙂 It means “the splitting of a main body into two parts”. HP has taken the approach that voice is nothing more than an application. They want to focus on the infrastructure that provides transport for that voice traffic, but they don’t want to be involved in developing the platforms that manage/create the voice traffic. Their goal is to identify areas like voice that they consider applications and work with third parties. While I tend to agree that it makes more sense to focus on the infrastructure from an HP networking perspective, it seems to me that HP is one of those companies that could actually put out a voice solution that would work. They have all of the pieces to make it happen. Networking, server hardware, applications expertise, etc. Perhaps to do that, it would take several years of development on their part and they obviously want to remained focused on other things.
I have covered everything(minus the storage de-duplication talk) up to the technical discussion from HP. In the next post, I will jump into the nerdier things. There was so much meaty information from the discussions leading up to the technical presentation that I thought I would re-hash the points that I thought were the most interesting. The more time I spend in the industry, the more interested I get in the non-technical things when it comes to the different vendors out there. That’s not to say that I don’t like the very technical things, because I do. I just think that if you are going to devote a substantial amount of time to learning a vendor’s technology(and we all do), you need to make sure that technology is going to be around for more than a year or two. Understanding where the focus of company XYZ is will go a long way in determining what you need to focus on and what you need to let go the way of the dinosaur.
So……next post on HP will be more technically focused and this time I mean it. 🙂
*****Disclaimer: As a delegate for Tech Field Day 5, my flight, food, lodging and transportation expenses were paid for in part by HP. I am under no obligation to write anything regarding HP either good or bad. Anything I choose to write are my opinions, and mine alone. **********