ProCurve: Networking is not about cost

• Tags:
• Map,
• Vision,
• Adaptive,
• Edge

Colin Barker ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 15 Feb 2008 15:56 GMT

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...five years ago is allowing us to deploy a tremendous amount of functionality and to open up new capabilities in our technology that, in fairness, most of the other architecture out there can't.

What is your market share in the switch market?
Obviously it differs greatly depending on whether you are looking at ports or revenue. We have almost twice as much market share in ports as we do in revenue, as we tend to be a little bit better value than some of our competitors. In EMEA, when you look at our share in ports, we have been running at 16 or 17 percent.

If you look at the competition [Cisco] for the first time, in revenue terms, and from a port point of view, they have slipped below 50 percent of the market and we believe that trend is going to continue.

Why do you think customers prefer to buy your kit over Cisco's?
The reason, I think, is that there is a complicated buying process you see in this area of the market.

This isn't a commodity purchase for most enterprises. It is not around price. Most people make the mistake of thinking it is price-driven and it's not. They see the network as a strategic asset. The best way I can describe it is as kind of a substrate, to their communications, to their IT, to their security… there are about four or five different strategies that become part of this major buying cycle.

As a result, [customers] tend to buy this infrastructure with a very long capital cycle so they think of it in seven to 10 years. In any buying process like that, you have so many linkages, such as management, service and support and application deployment, they tend to deep-dive into it. So it is really not around price.

I think ProCurve over the past five to 10 years has had those things that really resonate with customers: stability and predictability. We have been very consistent with our message and haven't jumped from one to another. We have been saying "this is where we are going" and it has resonated with customers for the past five years. If I was to put a word around it, that is "safety". Another would be "security".

Is it as easy as that?
If you look at all the people who are predicting what will happen I think you cover a sub-set of what will happen, but there is always about 20 percent that nobody really predicted, nobody saw it coming. That is the biggest challenge.

That is why we took the decision to build an architecture that could handle that, that was capable of having new functionality ignited. So that is why we have an architecture that is able to do packet inspection on the fly, to have encryption onboard, even if that was not built in as a basic function of the product.

Can you give an example of an area that took everybody by surprise?
I think [an example is] a lot of the security architectures that are being sold today. If you think about 2000/2001, we were talking a lot about VoIP, which was the application area that everybody needed to worry about. But there were solutions on the market that did nothing for mobility or security.

The security layer that now must come over voice and mobility was the one thing that most of the industry did not catch. So the architectures that were deployed in 2000/2001 have already been pulled out.

Right now, security and what is happening in that area with access control, trusted computing groups, standardisation and unification around a common architecture, client integrity checking — those are breakthroughs. They are critical in allowing new functionality and better value as well as [being] easier to deploy.

So you think you were right about those things?
Absolutely. I can go back to my slides in 2002 when I was beating a drum about it. It is not about voice, mobility or security, it's about how all three play together.

It's about supporting the portable handset that's secure that can handle all three issues. So the Adaptive Edge architecture, the 5300 and 5400 products that we sell, are completely active with today's access control methods. They interact with our appliances and have anomaly-detection capabilities and network immunity, because we can program them with agents that will create and detect these new capabilities inside of existing protocols and architecture.

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