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Hewlett-Packard Senior Vice President and General Manager Marius Haas didn't mention Cisco Systems by name in his opening keynote at Interop Las Vegas 2010.
As the executive who oversees HP's ProCurve networking division, Haas didn't have to name names. Instead, he painted how the complete picture HP offers, thanks in part to the acquisition of 3Com Corp., makes the battle to control the network from the edge to the core a "two-horse race."
Haas said the network is transforming. It's no longer a single force. The network is on a convergence course, he said, and must integrate everything from servers, storage and networking to services and management to be effective and help business cut costs and get more value out of their systems.
"The network needs the transformation because it needs to be the glue that holds together the other components," Haas said to a capacity crowd.
Haas said the HP team was "amazingly surprised" by the technology that the 3Com acquisition brought to HP's table, enabling them to not only tell a true edge-to-core story but also attack new markets where 3Com had a strong foothold, namely China where 3Com's H3C line is the market share leader in router and switching ports sold.
"HP is the only company that has all of the IP: servers, storage, networking, services and management," Haas said, adding that now the company can appease customers with an "I want everything from HP" credo with its converged infrastructure strategy.
With a massive HP S12500 data center switch (formerly a 3Com H3C switch) at stage right, Haas laid out how the switch stacks up against Cisco, again opting not to mention the San Jose, Calif.-based networking giant and its largest competitor by name. Haas said the S12500 packs in twice the performance, with 2.1 billion data packets-per-second of throughput compared to its main competitor's roughly 1 billion packets-per-second. Haas added that the S12500 can do that while consuming roughly 30 percent less power than its unnamed chief rival.
And the addition of 3Com's TippingPoint security arm, which Haas said made more vulnerability discoveries than all other competitors combined, gives HP a strong security angle as well.
Ultimately, Haas said, HP wants to simplify IT and leverage open and standards-based technologies while offering best in class technology with the best total cost of ownership.
"We're excited about the transformation we're going to drive and accelerate with these capabilities in hand," Haas said.
