This is the second of in a series of four newsletters that chronicle the conversations that Jim had with a variety of vendors and enterprise IT organizations on his recent trip to the greater Boston area. This newsletter will look at the continually deteriorating relationship between HP and Cisco and what this means for IT organizations as both HP and Cisco race to provide an integrated solution that involves networking, storage and servers.
HP replaces Cisco core
It was not that long ago that HP and Cisco were close partners. In fact, until recently HP was Cisco’s largest systems integrator on a worldwide basis. One way that the close HP-Cisco relationship was manifested in the not too distant past was that the HP services organization would lead by offering customers Cisco equipment and not their own ProCurve products.
The HP – Cisco relationship began to unravel right after Cisco announced that it was getting into the server business. One manifestation of that unraveling is that earlier this year Cisco declined to renew HP’s System Integration contract. In fact, Keith Goodwin, Cisco’s Worldwide Partner Organization senior vice president, stated that, “HP and Cisco have evolved from partners to companies with different and conflicting visions of how to deliver value to customers. We have already reached out to HP to begin the discussion around a new agreement that ensures business continuity for existing customers and better reflects the current state of our relationship. We will also honor Cisco customer service contracts with HP for their duration.”
The demise of the HP – Cisco relationship demonstrates that it is difficult for large IT organizations to keep a partnership alive over the long term. That presents a challenge for IT organizations. In particular, when IT organizations are evaluating a solution provided by a vendor and one or more of their partners, the IT organization needs to evaluate how solid the partnership is and what the impact would be on the IT organization if the partnership fell apart.
In the next newsletter we will continue our discussion of the eroding Cisco-HP relationship and what that means for IT organizations.
