Cisco raised a big stink over losing a longtime customer's $3.5M network upgrade deal to HP

However, I'm siding with Cisco on this one.

Last summer I blogged about why HP ProCurve was dismantling Cisco's market share on a deal-by-deal basis. Interestingly enough, The Arizona Republic is reporting this week that Cisco raised a big stink over losing its longtime Arizona customer - Gilbert Public School's $3.5 million network upgrade deal to HP.

According to the Republic, Cisco engineer - Kevin Murphy spoke at a Gilbert Public Schools board meeting and complained that the school's consultants overstated Cisco's $5 million bid by $1.2 million, apparently because the consultants had ignored Cisco's last cost estimate, which had been submitted on August 13.

The Republic continued that Gilbert Public Schools assistant superintendent - Barb VeNard, who oversees curriculum and technology services, said before she insisted on having HP also bid on the project, Cisco last spring had quoted a price of $8.1 million.

Cisco engineer Kevin Murphy then urged the board "to level the playing field" and cited the missing price information as one reason to question the consultants' report.

Unconvinced with Murphy and Cisco's argument, Gilbert Public Schools Board President - Thad Stump and district administrators, including Superintendent Dave Allison, said Cisco, a longtime partner of Gilbert Public Schools, was just disappointed it lost the award.

Stump believes the consultants gave a fair comparison, showing the district could have spent $4 million more on the Cisco network than HP over the next few years.

After reading the entire Republic report, I've got to side with Cisco that the deal's award to HP could certainly appear highly suspect.

And why do I think that?

Well, because in my personal opinion, there definitely appears to be a lot of "shady activity" going on.

What's your take, is HP succeeding at dismantling Cisco's market share on a deal-by-deal basis?

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• Cisco
• LANs / WANs
• Cisco engineer - Kevin Murphy
• Gilbert Public School's $3.5 million network upgrade to HP
• Gilbert Public Schools assistant superintendent - Barb VeNard
• Gilbert Public Schools Board President - Thad Stump
• HP also bid on the project
• Superintendent Dave Allison