Taking on Goliath

HP ProCurve, the networking arm of the global IT solutions provider HP, is picking up the pace in its challenge of IP networking market leader Cisco. At a business strategy event in January, ProCurve revealed its multi-vendor alliance programme with partners including Avaya, Microsoft and McAfee, aimed at propelling the networking company to the forefront of the sector. Michelle Mills reports from Paris

ProCurve, which is integrated within HP’s Technology Solutions Group (TSG), is the number two networking infrastructure player globally, though the rift between second place and pacesetter Cisco remains significant. In the EMEA region, ProCurve’s eight per cent market share trails far behind Cisco’s 50 per cent, with the latter offering not just comprehensive networking hardware but also a variety of Cisco-branded applications integrated into its network, including unified communications, telepresence and Internet security.

However, the HP wired and wireless networking unit is looking to build on its revenue growth of almost 60 per cent in the Middle East in 2008, and its leadership in the Ethernet switch market, to narrow the gap with its main rival. With the announcement in January of the HP ProCurve Open Network Ecosystem (ProCurve ONE) alliance, ProCurve aims to compete with Cisco in more areas through the offer of enterprise-class solutions from partners, which come integrated in ProCurve’s own infrastructure, and which have been optimised.

“We want to deliver a standards-based solution that provides ultimate flexibility to customers and allows them to do it at the most cost-effective model, which we are going to do in conjunction with our partner ecosystem,” stated Marius Haas, senior vice president and general manager of ProCurve, via live satellite-linking to Paris at an event in January.

“Customers want choice…but they will not sacrifice quality. There might be choices out there but one thing enterprises won’t do is threaten their networks by deploying unqualified products that are not optimised to their particular environment. They want to have flexibility from a plug-and-play standpoint, but they also want to make sure they don’t have proprietary architectures that will lock them in, without the control they need,” Haas added.

Haas believes the ProCurve’s converged open-standards approach will see it carve market share away from Cisco, offering core features of choice, flexibility, simplicity, competitive pricing and a team of ‘best of breed’ partners.Some of the alliance partner applications ProCurve will be able to offer on its infrastructure include network access protection from Microsoft, unified communications from Avaya, IP-based enterprise communications from Aastra, WAN optimisation from Riverbed, and network security from McAfee.

Avaya’s Martyn Lambert says being part of ProCurve’s ONE alliance will extend the reach of Avaya’s unified communications services through the support of an exponentially larger sales force

Avaya is playing a significant role in assisting ProCurve to develop a unified communications offering, given the former enjoys a 20 per cent market share in the IP telephony space. Avaya will provide its Communication Manager switching software as part of the alliance. Martyn Lambert, Avaya’s vice president of marketing for EMEA, says such a tie-up brings ProCurve the latest generation IP telephony, in real time.

“Unified communications is all driven off the telephone switch, which allows enterprises to do call forwarding, video conferencing, multi-party conferencing – all the distribution and directory they would ever want to do,” Lambert commented. “The extension to cellular also means enterprises can seamlessly switch from a desktop phone to a cellphone, and vice-versa.”

Lambert believes one of the main advantages to potential clients of ProCurve is they can purchase the ProCurve stack featuring Avaya software, pre-tested, pre-certified and delivered. In the past, if customers were to choose their own best in class solutions, they would have to also oversee the integration process in order to install and test solutions on top of another vendor’s infrastructure. What ProCurve’s alliance has done is to allow the integration to have already been done for customers, providing seamless convergence of data and voice on the same network.

“It takes the fight direct to Cisco. You now have two mainstream massive players in the market – Cisco and Hewlett Packard. The Cisco approach is that you buy everything from the one vendor, with unified communications encoded in the network layer, which Cisco controls, so you cannot change that. In the HP solution, all the unified communications IP technology is top of rack, meaning you can change it,” Lambert said.

HP and its resellers will serve as channels for Avaya’s solutions, while Avaya and the other ProCurve ONE members will not sell ProCurve’s switches, stacks or other networking equipment through their channels. Thus Avaya faces the potential benefit of extending the coverage and reach of its products to an exponentially larger market. HP’s TSG sales team is 23,000-strong globally, and is being introduced to all the products being offered through the ONE alliance. On its own, Avaya’s global workforce is 14,000, with 450 business partners in the EMEA region. Lambert estimates that HP has 1,500-2,000 business partners in the region, with a third focussed on the ‘mid-market’, which in IP-telephony terms is between 50-300 users.

ProCurve’s vice president and general manager for the EMEA region, Alberto Soto, said the company would also focus on competing with Cisco in the large enterprise and corporate market, focussing on accounts with global presence. He believes that HP’s well known brand, along with its strong service, support and channel partners, provides an attractive alternative.

ProCurve’s Alberto Soto said the acquisition of Colubris Networks gives ProCurve an edge in complex and challenging mobile environments using the 802.11n standard

“These enterprises are companies that are going through a downturn and are now questioning a lot of the IT investments they have made in the past, relying on the same vendor on an ongoing basis. They are questioning if this strategy is the right one,” asserted Soto.

“We are going to focus on the infrastructure; we are going to make sure we are successful there. But we are going to rely on alliance partners that are doing a very good job in other areas to complement our offer. The moment you try to do everything yourself, you tend to fail. We are trying to focus on what we are good at and have a good track record in, while trying to bring in other partners that can add value to what we do.”

ProCurve does not break out its financial performance separately to HP, but counter to rumours that the business is losing money, Soto insisted that ProCurve is in good shape and is in fact a very profitable company. This is evidenced, he says, by its recent acquisition of Colubris Networks last October.

“This is the first time that ProCurve went to the market and acquired a company and a technology – specifically the wireless technology 802.11n, which is a very important standard and one we didn’t have in our portfolio,” Soto explained. “We went to the marketplace to search for companies that could provide this standard, and Colubris had a world class technology around mobility, including this standard,” he recalled.

Colubris’ mobility solutions have been integrated into ProCurve’s portfolio, and allow the company to engage in the offer of ever more complex and challenging wireless infrastructure environments. One such example is a video surveillance network on trains in Hong Kong that presented the challenge of maintaining a continuous wireless signal as a train is in motion.

“The infrastructure is based both outside the train and inside the train, and you have to keep a communication link going to make sure you don’t lose the signals, while switching from one cell to the next. We came up with the solution,and this is one of the things  we are able to achieve with Colubris,” Soto commented.

From the perspective of industry analyst Alessandra Fitzpatrick of Canalys, the alliance confirms the flexibility of ProCurve’s infrastructure platforms, while providing new revenue streams for partners that can potentially lower operating costs, reduce energy consumption, and which are simple and easy to deploy.

“HP ProCurve’s Open Network Ecosystem takes the concept of strategic alliances one step further, as it not only provides customers with a choice of multiple applications on multiple appliances, it is executing on true go-to-market partnerships of combined solutions,” Fitzpatrick said.

“The fact that ProCurve ONE has identified common resellers with leading companies in their respective market segments such as Avaya, and Aastra in voice, Fortinet and McAfee in security, and Microsoft, gives all vendors that participate in ProCurve ONE credibility in their joint solutions and the competitive advantage of engaging with new channel partners.”

However, Cisco’s managing director of the Gulf and Pakistan, Sam Alkharrat, is not fazed about the ONE Alliance, saying Cisco and HP have a long-standing strategic alliance in some areas including the data centre and vertical solutions like digital hospital infrastructure.

“Cisco customers benefit from streamlined operational expenses, familiar management tools and a single source for support and service,” states Alkharrat.

He adds that according to a Dell’Oro Group report, Cisco generated 15 times the revenue of the next closest vendor during Q308.

Illustrations by Christopher Howlett