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Adam Jura, Senior Analyst & Jens Butler, Principal Analyst: Cisco hands the services platter to DiData
February 2010 by
With today’s announcement that it is killing its long-standing partnership arrangement with HP, Cisco has clearly highlighted that a product play is still a critical component of its longer-term strategy. 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 programme membership.
Cisco has made the divorce with HP, having no relationship to be a certified reseller after April 30th, 2010. HP today then announced they have expanded a storage switch reseller contract with QLogic.
Adam Jura, Senior Analyst & Jens Butler, Principal Analyst, comments:
“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 programme membership.”
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 (announced yesterday) will also demand substantial time and effort to fully cascade through and convert into real business opportunity.
Conversely, Cisco will need to be able to have 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. In light of Cisco’s strategy of enabling versus competing against partner services offerings, expect, in particular, DiData to be blessed with more attention from Cisco going forward.
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