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We know where the TippingPoint products will fall within HP Networking but how will you continue to grow this line?
TippingPoint was a wonderful gem that came with this acquisition. Customers are telling us, I want a more flexible network architecture, I want to have a better cost structure and I want it to be more secure. TippingPoint and the capabilities it has prevents more attacks than anybody else, identifies all other vulnerabilities, and now these capabilities we can bring to a broader audience. We're going to aggressively look at it and target it.
3Com also brings you a voice line. This is somewhat new ground for HP.
A little bit. As you know, we announced a partnership with Microsoft supporting UC aspects and we're continuing to drive that with Microsoft. We've got partnerships with Avaya and Alcatel-Lucent on the enterprise-class voice stuff. The 3Com voice solution is very good but mostly tailored to the midmarket. Job one is to make sure we have the networking enterprise nailed, but we will continue to drive and continue to invest in the voice solutions and make sure they're clearly very solid. Where it makes sense, we'll work up stream with our voice portfolio to offer a broader set of capabilities to the enterprise and data center.
And you'll continue to nurture OfficeConnect, the lower end products?
Yes we will. We will invest in it. There are a lot of a partners skilled in those capabilities and it's important to the broader HP networking story. Absolutely.
With all these tools in mind, can you articulate a bit more the fundamental differences in partnering strategy between HP Networking and Cisco?
Yeah, one, you've got to have technology that people want, and it's got to be an architecture that is driving industry, open standards, is modular, and gives the customer flexibility to deploy it when they want and how they want without locking them in to any proprietary stacks. It has to be not only a great technology, but it's going to be delivered the way they want and delivered on economic terms that are radically different than what they're used to. Job one, right? Now you have something customers want and you have to make sure that the customers are well-incented, so what we've done is we've enhanced our partner program significantly on the economic side and we're rolling that out to partners as we speak. Part of the event we had last week, Mark Hurd held a meeting with a pretty exclusive group of CEOs of some of our top channel partners and went through the programs with them. Every one of them came out of there pretty excited. We feel we've got the right understanding with our channel partners and we're very predictable in our approach.
What other impressions did the CEOs in that meeting give you?
That they were very committed to going on this journey with us. This is not asking them to make a choice, this is not saying, it's this or it's that. Here is our program, and here is the incremental value that you and your business can gain from it. Here is how it is differentiated from others. We'd love to have you as part of this journey. The feedback from customers has been extremely positive; we nailed all the key items. The key thing they want to do now is have clear communication of all the reference-able sales out there to see the momentum happen.
So HP isn't applying pressure on solution providers to sell HP only, or HP versus Cisco?
No. [pause] No. We like people to sell HP solutions, and we will incent them to do so. But we're not going to say 'You need to do one or the other' -- we're not asking for that. We believe that the market will choose and I think the partner community will follow what the market looks for.
NEXT: How HP Picked 3Com From The Crowd
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