I spoke on the phone today with the Vice President and General Manager of HP ProCurve - Karl Soderlund, and learned why HP ProCurve is dismantling Cisco's market share on a deal-by-deal basis, for instance:
If you trade-in your Cisco equipment, HP ProCurve will take 20% off its list price.
By doing so, I feel that HP ProCurve is whacking Cisco in its most vulnerable spot, its lack of pricing flexibility.
And why does Cisco lack pricing flexibility?
Well, mostly because Cisco VARs no longer have enough margin left to profitably match HP ProCurve pricing on a deal-by-deal basis. Furthermore in my opinion, while Cisco salivates over 30 to 50 new market adjacencies, Cisco's loss of market share has in itself become the networking industry's newest market transition.
It appears HP ProCurve is calling the shots now, because during my conversation with Soderlund, he knowingly stated, "We’ve seen Cisco offer price-matching discounts to existing customers in order to equal ProCurve prices – and react to ProCurve’s momentum and market share gains. ProCurve wants to make all Cisco customers aware of this offer, giving every existing Cisco customer a discount, simply by contacting ProCurve to participate in the deal.
"HP ProCurve continues to win business and gain market share through increased awareness in the market. Customers and partners are becoming aware of the tremendous benefits HP ProCurve provides by offering the best value, and in this current economic climate, more companies are forced to look at alternative solutions in order to find the best innovation and best price. Those customers are re-evaluating their total cost of ownership and are turning to HP ProCurve.
"HP ProCurve is the price performance leader and has a TCO that no competitor can match. We've built our business around it. We’re currently offering VARs and end-users a variety of incentives to help them win more deals, but overall, we’re not changing anything, we’re executing on our existing strategy." Read more
As you may have already heard, Microsoft has cancelled its Microsoft Response Point product, which stemmed out of Microsoft Research's Startup Business Accelerator/Communications Innovation Center group. This hopeful compact small business PBX/key set system replacement had a lot of opportunity, but due to the product's inability to integrate with Microsoft's larger Unified Communications vision and product roadmap; it simply did not fit in. The current version of Response Poin Read more
Microsoft this afternoon responded to accusastions that it knew about a critical IE ActiveX hole for as long as 18 months. The hole is being actively exploited by hackers. To its credit, Microsoft came clean and admitted it did indeed know since the spring of 2008. Read more
Yesterday NetApp revealed that Cisco, VMware and NetApp are testing an end-to-end secure multi-tenancy platform. While it is well known that the three data center amigos have been feverishly pitching their joint so-called "private cloud" architecture, private clouds are built for the exclusive use of one company. A multi-tenancy infrastructure has but one purpose, to allow multiple companies to share the same hardware. It is a cloud service. Read more
In a succinct, informative Macworld article, Glenn Fleishman explains why.
Simply put: for pulling down data, the 3GS can use AT&T's newer HSDPA service, at 7.2 Mbps. The corresponding upstream service is HSUPA, at either 1.4 or 1.9 Mbps. AT&T is building out this higher speed network. Read more
For many years now, I have been an advocate of “skill-based” or “performance-based” certifications which involve actually performing the tasks of the job in order to prove you are qualified. A simple concept. Now Microsoft have joined the bandwagon, which is great… Read more
We are delighted to announce the winners to our June giveaways. The grand prize winner of a Cisco training course courtesy of Global Knowledge was awarded to Raymond Cooley Jr., a network engineer for defense contractor, Serco. Read more
ESG recently surveyed 480 North American and Western European IT decision makers and found significant early use of and interest in VDI Technology.
Jeff Wilson - network security analyst at Infonetics Research, provides further details on why Cisco has lost market share in network security: Read more
Researchers at IBM have developed software that uses optical character recognition and screen scraping to identify and cover up confidential data.
According to IBM the driving idea behind the MAGEN (Masking Gateway for Enterprises) system is to prevent data leakage and allow the sharing of data while safeguarding sensitive business data. Read more
Cisco announced more details on its plans to bring IP routers to the world of satellites (or shall we say 'solar system of satellites'?). At its Cisco Live user conference last week, the company said that it was about to launch a trial run of its Internet Routers In Space (IRIS) program with the defense department. Read more
Microsoft has licensed two of the industry's leading methods for IT governance, integrated them with its own IT governance framework and made the whole library of materials available for free. Read more
The following is a guest blog written by David Pinkus, a former high-level Google employee who is now senior vice president of information technology for Universal Technical Institute: I think a lightweight, browser-only operating system has been a long-time coming. It's the actualization of what the network computer dream has been; albeit with the predictable concessions that the network isn't always available, and you need something resident on the machine itself to make it useful. Read more
Troubleshooting a failed SQL Server 2008 installation
SQL Server 2008 introduces significant enhancements that make installation even easier and more seamless compared to its predecessors.
The SQL Server 2008 Installation Center offers solutions providers a tremendous number of options for planning, installing, upgrading and maintaining a SQL Server implementation.
However, even with these new tools and features, an installation may fail, and solutions providers must understand how to troubleshoot these installations. Read more
Since I started talking about licensing again in my previous blog, I thought I’d follow that up with some scenarios from the Microsoft web site. Of course, Microsoft supports multiple releases of SQL Server so the story may be different depending on the release you are under. Read more
Adoption of solid state drives (SSD) is hot property this week as vendors such as Fusion-IO, Compellent and LSI announced support for the newest Tier 0 storage devices. Read more
On a day when one of the largest wind farm plans bit the dust, the US Department of Energy is offering up a five-year, $45 million contract to design and build a large dynamometer facility for testing 5 to 15 MW rated wind turbines and equipment. Read more
The Cisco Certified Architect certification may well be the single biggest addition/change to the Cisco certification space since the introduction of CCNA and CCNP in 1998. In the space of two years, Cisco has taken the pinnacle of the Cisco cert space - the CCIE - and added another cert billed as equivalent for Design issues (CCDE), and then made a new pinnacle to the cert pyramid - the new Cisco Certified Architect cert - sitting on top of the CCDE.. Network World bills it as a Ph.D. in Cisco. Read more
While the world has been focused on the when, how and where of Android appearing on netbooks, Google has been quietly creating yet another operating system, this one based on Chrome and unrelated to Android. Google is going after Microsoft at the jugular vein, yesterday targeting Office applications and e-mail and today the very platform on which PCs have always r Read more
Dartmouth University researchers have received Department of Homeland Security funding to make public key infrastructure easier to use for those looking to secure and authenticate network transactions.
Their PKI Resource Query Protocol (PRQR) is working its way through the IETF standards process. Read more
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