ProCurve confident of success

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Whenever we face an enterprise or corporate customer who is searching for an alternative, then we are the clear alternative. - Alberto Soto, vice president and general manager for HP ProCurve, EMEA

HP ProCurve recently hosted its EMEA partners and media in Chantilly, France to discuss its future strategy.

Currently sitting in second place in the networking space, HP ProCurve unveiled its plans to continue garnering market share in 2009 with a series of initiatives and new products.

The networking major unveiled the HP ProCurve ONE program at its EMEA event held in Chantilly France. The program is a multi-vendor alliance program that has been designed to optimise the performance of enterprise-class applications with HP ProCurve infrastructure. Amongst the partners already included in the group are the likes of Avaya, Microsoft and McAfee.

Also revealed was the latest in the company's datacentre switches and management software. The Datacentre Connection Manager is designed to streamline operations in next generation datacentre, while the 6600 switch series has added five new switches to its portfolio.

Alberto Soto, vice president and general manager for HP ProCurve in EMEA was on hand to explain the company's plans for the future. "The biggest news is that we are moving away from the second tier of vendors and are being seen as the clear alternative to the incumbent.

One of the drivers in terms of growth is the current economic environment and the other one is that whenever we face an enterprise or corporate customer who is searching for an alternative then we are the clear alternative," explained Soto.

Soto is extremely positive regarding ProCurve's latest products and pointed to the fact that they are the culmination of much research and development on the part of HP. Given the current financial crisis affecting the world Soto pointed out that the company remains committed to the emerging markets.

"It does not matter if we are experiencing great growth or even a slowdown in the emerging markets; we have a strategy to ensure we keep our pace. We did not go too fast when things were going very well in the Middle East, instead we took a conservative stand and were careful in which countries we placed our resources," said Soto.

"We take things step by step and you won't see us investing when we don't need to. I do not think we did anything crazy when growth was in double digits and we won't do anything crazy like disinvesting or shedding now that growth has slowed. There is a plan and we will continue to follow that plan in a diligent manner," continued Soto.

Procurve attained 30% growth in 2008 and although it is eager to continue along similar lines in 2009, Soto admits that it will be a difficult task. "We want to maintain our current 30% growth. This is obviously something we need to evaluate given the current economic environment and we want to be realistic. We do face challenges and we do face a slowdown but we are definitely very well positioned to cope with the current realities," he said.

Looking ahead Lin Nease, director of emerging technologies at HP ProCurve, emphasised the company's commitment to the datacentre space. "We are investing heavily in the blade centre business with the Storageworks business of HP. We are now also more aligned with our network and consulting services as well," Nease said.

Nease believes that his organisation's key strength is in the office LAN market which can be translated into datacentre deployments. "We now also have the opportunity to grow into more of a solutions carrier role," said Nease.

"A year or two ago clients of other vendors did not doubt what they had done in the past but now are beginning to question some of the investments they made and this is the opportunity for us," concluded Soto as he discussed the strategy and prospects ahead.

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