Cisco: 'Competition makes us stronger'

The global competitive networking landscape is changing but New Zealand customers can rest easy.

Geoff Lawrie, New Zealand Country Manager for Cisco, confirmed to The Channel that a strategy has been put in place to take care of existing customers with both HP and Cisco products as the companies increasingly compete in certain areas.

In an interview at the Cisco Global Partner Summit in San Francisco, Lawrie said: “Clearly the international dimension of our [the HP/Cisco] relationship has fallen out of bed and no longer exists, and in a formal sense they have terminated that. “In a New Zealand context we have had some good dialogue with HP about the outcome that our customers want and we’ve got an agreement with them about how we treat those customers to ensure they are not compromised by any parting of the ways between our two companies.”

Over recent times the two companies have increasingly expanded into each other’s traditional territories, with Cisco launching a server built for a virtualised environment, architected and designed with a management layer around it, while HP introduced its ProCurve networking products, and most recently bought Asian networking giant 3Com.

This week the two companies are both hosting their global partner conferences, but Cisco’s Keith Goodwin, Senior Vice President of the Worldwide Partner Organisation said in his keynote speech: “competition makes us stronger”.