HP's Next CEO Needs To Steer The Ship: Page 2 of 2

Meanwhile, HP beats the standards drum and falls further behind. Standards are wonderful things, but HP needs to shake up the market and get some attention by talking about the "A Series," composed of the H3C switches acquired from 3Com, and what it can do for data center networking. Cisco is market leader and the company to beat. Cisco is also the company being talked about most. HP has eeked out some discussion about FlexFabric, which attempts to simplify cabling, but these are incremental issues that won't get IT interested in HP as a networking company. 

The next few years in data center networking are going to be about flatter, faster, robust networking, carrying data and storage traffic and supporting virtualization strategies. HP owns most of the components for a full data center with the exception of FC switching, which it OEMs from Cisco and Brocade. The company just needs to plan, articulate and execute on a holistic data center strategy.

Finally, their professional services arm, HP Enterprise Services, which Paul McDougall says hasn't been used well, needs to be clearly focused on moving existing customers off Cisco infrastructure and onto HP gear. That is going to be a difficult process and some customers won't migrate, but if HP can offer a better network architecture with clear capital and operational savings, HP can start winning deals and increasing market share.