The road ahead

NME: What’s brought you to the Middle East just now?

JMcH: This is part of a multi-region, world rollout of this five-year vision that ProCurve has been working on, very much from a strategy and technology standpoint. This represents the next phase of evolution, from the adaptive-edge architecture which we announced just under five years ago.

NME: In a nutshell, what’s the new five-year plan about?

JMcH: I think the most unique part of the vision – for ProCurve specifically – is that we’re moving our strategy and business development and customer engagement to a more business-oriented model, rather than a product- and technology-oriented model, which in fairness is kind of where we came from. It’s not that we’re going to stop being technology leaders, but we really believe that for the next five years especially, for the business to grow from a strategic point of view, continue to grow in relevance, we need to talk to customers in a language that adds value to their business, not just “here’s our great new technology”.

NME: In business terms, what is your value proposition?

JMcH: From a business perspective, the things that we want to provide to customers is an infrastructure which is low-complexity, that enables and protects their information assets, and does so in a way that is very pro-active, has a strong return on investment. Specifically we think our missions are to provide this adaptive network, which is adaptive to different users and use models, adaptive to different applications, and adaptive to the organisational needs of our customers.

NME: What’s your plan to achieve this, from your current position?

JMcH: From where we are now, I think we’re in an extremely strong position – like I said, we did something comparable to this in 2002. We talked about, and we went out publicly and asserted what we called the adaptive-edge architecture – that was a product and technology strategy. The concept of the adaptive-edge architecture was pretty simple – at that point, most networks had all their intelligence, flexibility, processing power at the core of the network, and they were surrounded by relatively fixed-configuration devices. We thought strongly that in the next five years from then, the need for distributed intelligence would increase – and most IT infrastructures have gone to a similar mode. You would see a balance of intelligence at the core, but also intelligence and flexibility right to the edge of the network. Because that message wasn’t just a marketing message, but a plan on record, we spent the last four years implementing devices which I believe are three years ahead of our competition in the flexibility of processor cores embedded in the silicon of the devices that you connect to, that have a deep set of silicon-based routing, packet inspection – all sorts of functionality that’s built right into that edge device. And yet they’re cost-comparable to other vendors’ devices without that level of flexibility. What that now gives us is a foundation for us to provide much more advanced functionality, advanced management, and deploy services and capabilities into that network infrastructure that is dramatically different to the way our competitors can do it. And that’s back to that issue of a network that’s adaptive to users, applications, and organisational needs – it’s enabled by that hardware infrastructure. It’s like we’ve built this building over the last four years, and now we’re lighting up the floors in that building.

NME: Where do you see corporate networks in five years’ time – how are organisations going to be using their networks that’s different to today?

JMcH: The primary forcing functions that we think will represent an evolution of where our customers are today, are the rate of change and how dynamic the organisations will need to be – this will continue to go up. It’s been steadily rolling along, and to some extent accelerating over the last five years, and there’s no reason that trend won’t continue. The business models, the need to adapt from one day to the next, the need to have a network that can provide facilities to put all their information assets on, that’s well protected. The other thing, and this trend has already begun, is that network management is going to go from a technology-driven job to a business-driven job. In other words, the jargon and lingo that comes with your network management system and network devices, is going to be based on business understanding, not an understanding of how to configure a VLAN or ACLS or something like that. We believe that’s fundamental to making this enterprise facility have more value and be managed more appropriately.

NME: From a technology point of view, what will be seeing in the future? Other vendors are focusing on converged networks and converged mobile devices – will ProCurve be doing anything similar to this?

JMcH: The observation I have, which was as true four years ago as it is today, is when you talk to the major vendors, you don’t see a lot of difference between how we see the world over the next five to 10 years. Most rational people, most informed people see the market and see the same challenges ahead of us. I think where the suppliers and vendors differ more substantially is how we feel we need to address those problems, and how as a developer or architecture team we can uniquely provide the solutions for customers. What ProCurve has done in the past, and will continue to do, is not to try to do proprietary end-to-end standards – this means we’re often not first to market with a specific functionality. We’re not going to go and try and invest in both network infrastructure as well as all the applications which run on the network – it’s not our mission. What I want to do is enable advanced applications and advanced technology, but I want to do it with industry standards, do it with a vision of a multi-vendor environment, and a lot of focus on migrating customers’ existing infrastructure and keeping it relevant for as long as possible. Obviously I think that’s a very different perspective from how Cisco, for instance, approaches the market and engages with its customers. At the end of the day, ProCurve’s trying to address the same advanced functionality as Cisco, and for what Cisco might be able to do because they’re such a comprehensive investor in this area, in terms of defining an end-to-end architecture, ProCurve tries to make up for by enabling customers who can’t afford that kind of custom solution, can’t afford the training and cost of the staff it requires. Instead we try to deliver it to them in a way that’s standard, that’s well integrated, that has strong management tools around it.

NME: What is ProCurve’s perspective on partnering with other vendors at the moment?

JMcH: ProCurve has been very engaged with partners – they’re part of our basic strategy, in the past and going forward. For instance, we have partners on the voice side – obviously we have a lot of partners in how we go to market, as that’s our sole method of how we fulfil product. But internally, from a development standpoint, there’s two points I’d make about our strategic development partners. One, we tend to have very long-term relationships with partners – in this market, you can’t really give a customer a technology or an architecture, and then change your mind two years later. Customers think in terms of five to seven years in this space, and if you are constantly going from one strategy to another, one architecture to another, they get bored with it real quickly. They’re exposed for five years for that decision they made to buy from you during generation one. So we tend to keep very long-term partners – for the most part, up to this point, I’ve wrapped myself pretty tightly around those partners. In other words, I don’t look like something like the Microsoft ecosystem of utilities or applications that run on their operating systems. We look more like we have capabilities that are coming from strategic partners, but once again customers hold me accountable to whether those work, whether they’re integrated, whether they’re manageable, whether they’re reliable. So we tend to work very closely with those partners, but not represent an independent channel. I think from where we stand right now, and what we’ve built with the adaptive-edge architecture, you’re going to see us having many more partnerships that are visible to the end user – in other words, they use ProCurve, because we’re shipping about 4 million ports a quarter, and many of those – around 29% - are our most advanced devices which have the ability to run other people’s functionality on them, in a way which ProCurve doesn’t need to be very involved in turning it on and getting that value. So as we go forward now, now that we’ve built this building we’re going to look for tenants to show up on various floors of this building.

NME: Looking at the channel, you’ve talked about a move towards a business perspective – how are you going to equip your channel partners to deal with this shift?

JMcH: The answer to that is that we tend to look at a tiered approach. ProCurve’s strength is being able to do advanced functionality, but doing it in a way that’s easy to use and easy to deploy. The lower end of our product family really can just be purchased, networks can be designed and deployed by customers or partners that have a limited set of capabilities. How we complement that is with a select group of partners that are highly skilled, to deal with more complex customer environments. We focus on those in the environments where we’re doing direct selling, where it’s more advanced technology – so customers don’t get exposed and don’t end up with someone who doesn’t really have the background to handle a more complicated deployment.

NME: There’s been some speculation about ProCurve’s position within HP, and how this will continue in the future – how does it fit into HP’s structure, and what do you have to say to speculations of a sell-off?

JMcH: You can’t just be a one-trick pony in this space; you’ve got to know everything about networking, and you’ve got to have a vision for the next five years, in order to engage with these customers. So what HP did when they decided to stay in the business, was to create ProCurve Networking within HP – we created a networking company that was going to be full of networking professionals, dedicated to being a leader in networking – but that happened to be within HP. It’s mutually beneficial to us having the HP brand – right now we’re one of the fastest-growing businesses in HP, one of the more profitable businesses in HP. From a market success standpoint you can’t question our growth – from number 11 in 1998, to number five in 2002, to number two in 2007 – the model appears to be working. We know there are rumours out there; but I believe a lot of that’s driven by the fact that we keep our own personality and we operate independently – we can engage and tie up with HP, but our model’s through partners. And customers have rewarded us for making that decision.