Cisco Ready To Throw Punches Against HP

Cisco Systems' recently appointed head of worldwide sales Thursday issued a call to arms to the vendor's solution provider community, imploring them to "punch back" against its competitors.

Rob Lloyd during a keynote address at the Cisco Partner Summit in Boston told channel partners that the vendor will be much more aggressive in calling out rivals such as Hewlett-Packard than it has been in the past.

"I think we've been taking too many punches with regard to the competitive landscape and not punching back ... We'll keep it clean, but for you we need to help define the value proposition on why we're a better choice than [HP] ProCurve," Lloyd said, garnering applause from the audience. "I'm encouraging all of us to punch back-- with a little bit of class -- and if we get it right, it will make a big difference in the market."

Lloyd and Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers Wednesday afternoon also called out HP in a roundtable discussion with journalists.

"HP is a competitor, and we're going to have fun competing. We've never had a $110 billion competitor before," Chambers said of HP. "The last time we had this type of opportunity in front of us was with Nortel, Lucent [and] Alcatel: great companies, and we held our own pretty effectively," Chambers said. Nortel earlier this year filed for bankruptcy protection. Alcatel and Lucent Technologies merged to form Alcatel-Lucent at the end of 2006.

Cisco is stepping up its rhetoric because competition now is fiercer, Lloyd said during his keynote, likening the scenario to a hockey fight. "In hockey, it's called 'the glare' ... Two people make eye contact, and nobody has to say anything: there's going to be a fight," he said.

Lloyd, who took over as Cisco's executive vice president of worldwide operations at the end of April after predecessor Rick Justice stepped down due to illness, oversees worldwide sales and worldwide channels, as well as Cisco's Internet business solutions group and strategic alliances organizations. He is widely seen within Cisco as Chambers' eventual successor.

Chambers and Lloyd are among several Cisco executives to use the Partner Summit as a platform for publicly naming HP as the company Cisco has squarely in its sights. The topic was front and center during the event following last month's revelation that HP and Microsoft have a $180 million plan to invest jointly in unified communications over the next four years. Cisco has staked a strong claim in the unified communications market by building up both its portfolio and its channel strategy over the last several years.

Cisco also recently launched its Unified Computing System -- a product that includes blade and rack servers -- for the data center, where it will butt heads with a variety of players, including HP. In addition, Cisco is facing increasingly stiff competition from HP's ProCurve networking division, which has built a strong following by offering low-cost switches with lifetime warranties. Cisco recently responded by rolling out limited lifetime warranties for the first time on select switches.