Cisco dissociates itself with HP

Cisco has parted ways with href="http://dqchannels.ciol.com/content/services/winshop/110012903.asp">
HP, while
the latter announcing that they have expanded a storage switch
reseller contract with QLogic.

Adam Jura, Senior Analyst and Jens
Butler, Principal Analyst, Ovum commented, “Essentially, Cisco does not
want to provide HP with roadmap information on competing 'innovative'
products, such as UCS, that was afforded HP as part of the certified
partner/reseller program membership.”

The announcement has killed Cisco's
long-standing partnership arrangement with HP. In the cold light of
day, it appears that HP needs Cisco more than Cisco needs HP, with
the 3Com acquisition expected to still take some time to be
completely integrated. In addition, the QLogic partnership expansion
will also demand substantial time and effort to fully cascade through
and convert into real business opportunity.

Conversely, Cisco will style="background: transparent none repeat scroll 0%; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial;">need
to be able to have href="http://dqchannels.ciol.com/content/stateofmart/109070102.asp">better
business value conversations with clients,
as HP has been clearly superior in this area. With this change in
direction, Cisco will still require someone to implement its products
going forward. Hence, the major winners out of this will be the
remaining partners, in particular Dimension Data (incorporating
Datakraft), which is continuing to impress in its performance in the
Cisco products and solutions implementation space. Cisco's strategy
of enabling versus competing against partner services offerings,
expects particularly DiData to be blessed with more attention from
Cisco going forward.