In our last newsletter we began a discussion of the rapidly eroding Cisco – HP relationship. We will use this newsletter to continue that discussion and to put that failed relationship into perspective and to discuss what all of this means to IT organizations.
While the breakup of the Cisco-HP relationship is important, it is clearly not the only such breakup that we have seen. Other examples of failed relationships among large IT organizations include HP and EMC, BT and MCI as well as BT and AT&T.
So what does this mean for the integrated solutions that both Cisco and HP are racing to develop? Well Cisco is the strongest networking vendor in the industry and has just recently started to sell servers. They partner with both NetApp and EMC for storage. As noted, partnering is difficult. It is even more difficult to try to develop a close partnership with multiple companies if those companies are competitors of each other the way that NetApp and EMC are. Because of that difficulty, IT organizations need to be somewhat wary of these partnerships.
Chambers recently tried to reduce any concerns about the Cisco-EMC partnership by stating that he had a very close relationship with Joe Tucci. Tucci is the chairman of the board of directors, president and CEO of EMC. What Chambers said was “I’d trust Joe Tucci with my life”. That is a very dramatic statement. It would be interesting to ask Chambers not if he felt he could trust Tucci with his life, but if he thinks he has trusted Tucci with his life.
So what does the breakup of the Cisco-HP relationship mean for IT organizations? Well Jim was recently talking to Cisco about their UCS product. Cisco pointed out that it offered a management API for UCS and that it expected that companies like BMC and CA would take advantage of the API to provide management functionality. BMC and CA are great companies so it is good to see that they are involved in providing UCS management functionality. However, what stood out very clearly in the conversation was that Cisco didn’t mention either HP or IBM, companies that used to be Cisco’s closest partners. Most likely both HP and IBM will provide UCS management functionality. It is, however, quite likely that the functionality provided by HP and IBM will be a bit less feature rich and later to market.
Another impact of the eroding Cisco-HP relationship is that HP is trying to convince IT organizations that you can build high end data centers without using any Cisco equipment. Towards that end, HP is removing as much Cisco equipment from its infrastructure as it can. For example, as pointed out in a recent article , HP announced that all six of its internal next-generation data centers are now running company operations worldwide on HP Networking solutions. According to the article, HP said that it has replaced all of the non-HP core WAN routers and switches connecting the six data centers to each other and the Internet. They also installed 75 HP A-series routers and switches and upgraded and replaced 30 circuits and claimed that they did this with no data center downtime.
