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By Mel Duvall

HP continues to build out a strategy to more effectively compete against Cisco for a share of the data center market, announcing a three-year partnership with telecommunications and networking gear manufacturer Avaya.

The companies said that HP will sell some of Avaya’s communications and contact center products as part of its unified communications and collaboration portfolio. The combined products will be sold and delivered by HP.

The move is just the latest that HP and other server manufacturers have made to more effectively compete against Cisco, which has entered their traditional market with its own line of combined networking, storage and server products.

“HP and Avaya have highly complementary portfolios that deliver extraordinary benefits to customers, especially when combined with HP’s consulting and IT outsourcing expertise,” Joel Hackney, Avaya’s senior vice president for global sales, said in a statement.

“The HP and Avaya relationship enables customers to take out costs and transform their business via the strategic application of communications tools and services in the procurement and management model that best suits a company’s objectives,” added Hackney.

Under the deal, HP will offer Avaya’s Aura communications architecture and applications, contact center applications and end-user client applications under its own portfolio of offerings. Customers will also be able to outsource the operation of their Avaya systems to HP’s managed services arms.

HP’s strategy appears to be in stark contrast to that of Cisco, which is attempting to consolidate customers around its own products. HP has instead forged a series of partnerships with networking gear manufacturers, including a 10-year alliance it announced a year ago with Alcatel-Lucent.

Earlier this year HP also completed a $2.7 billion acquisition of networking gear manufacturer 3Com. That led to an announcement in April that HP had built a “Cisco-free” new data center utilizing 3Com products.

HP and Avaya said they have tested and certified their combined products across a broad range of applications at small, midsize and large enterprises.

Comments (1)

	1. 07-04-2010 23:07
	Strategic deals among vendors often sound better on paper than what they eventually turn out to be in reality, as partners need to be educated about each other's products, sales team incentives can differ among product lines, etc. Cisco's 'one vendor fits all' approach is also not guaranteed to win, but it is certainly easier to execute. Registered

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