The VAR Guy

Following HP’s keynote address at Interop 2011, The VAR Guy spoke to Erik Papir, manager of Worldwide Technical Marketing for HP Networking, who offered a deep-dive into HP’s networking strategy and how the company is helping its partners get on board with its new product offerings. Read on for the details …

Papir, who said his title and position in Technical Marketing was more like capital “t” and lower case “m” because he was more involved in the technical aspects of HP’s products, believes HP’s Flex approach to networking represents a turning point for infrastructure creation.

“The exciting part is the FlexFabric Networking. It’s something that has been lacking,” in the industry, Papir said. “Having that overreaching architecture is a key missing component. We’re trying to put the emphasis on the FlexNetworking [since that] paves the path for us going forward to have additional solutions … [that] fit into the architecture.” Sounds a lot like Legos.

The VAR Guy asked if HP’s partner approach with Flex Networking is to essentially label itself as vendor-agnostic.

“Yes,” Papir said, “we play nice with everybody, and that’s been a key part of the story. Every opportunity isn’t going to be a green field. There are networks from other vendors that exist today, [and we're aware]. In debunking the single-vendor network — that really emphasizes our story. We’re not saying it has to be an all-HP network.”

Papir noted HP plans to release an “interoperability cookbook” for partners and resellers, which essentially is a guide to which third-party vendor products work well with HP’s own products. Partners also can use the cookbook to help customers migrate to all-HP solutions, he said.

Such a cookbook will be helpful as more VARs look for alternative vendors and technologies as networking evolves beyond the traditional hardware realm, Papir said. “There are a lot of VARs that were typically Cisco-biased in the past [that] have certainly opened their eyes recently. [Our] statistics are encouraging. We’ve always done a great job with the partner community but this is a validation.” HP has seen a huge influx of interest from the VAR community, he added.

Since The VAR Guy always has his eye out for the SMB, he asked whether HP had plans to trickle down any of its enterprise solutions to partners focusing on smaller businesses. Papir said the e8200 and e5400 switches are ostensibly positioned as an access layer. However, for smaller businesses or branch offices, the e5400 can be deployed as a core switch instead. Papir also believes HP’s new wireless technologies can trickle down too, and as the technology moves downstream HP would ensure “the technology is consistent,” alluding to Marius Haas’ focus on HP’s consistent user interface and product management support.

Vendor neutrality is a popular theme we’ve seen before, so The VAR Guy will keep tabs on how HP evolves its vendor-neutral strategy in the upcoming year and see whether HP’s strategy has any impact on its next quarterly results.

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