How Cisco defeats HP in blade server deals

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How Cisco defeats HP in blade server deals
Mon, 6/6/11 - 11:10pm View comments

Update 6-7-2011:

Today I received an email from Cisco requesting that I take down this entire blog article.

So it appears (at least in my opinion), that China is NOT the only country where Cisco seeks to censor information that's found on the Internet. Cisco itself published the below material for all to see on its website, no login and no password is required.

Interestingly, the below email came from Cisco's senior corporate counsel - Mike Liu, apparently at the request of Cisco's vice president of SAVBU business operations - Suzanne Stout:

What's your take, do you agree with the above email from Cisco's Mike Liu and Suzanne Stout that I should take down this entire blog article?

Cisco defeats HP by winning a competitive blade server deal the following 6 ways:

Source: Cisco Systems

When comparing Cisco vs. HP blade server promotions and programs, green means competitive, yellow means less competitve, while red means severely lacking in competitiveness:

Source: Cisco Systems

How Cisco's Server Access Virtualization Business Unit (SAVBU) is attacking HP:

Source: Cisco Systems

When competing in a blade deal, Cisco believes HP will always bring up the benefits of its Converged Infrastructure, especially the higher up within an account HP speaks:

Source: Cisco Systems

Cisco considers FlexFabric the main pillar of HP's converged message (circled in red, notice how Cisco has singled-out for attack HP's CNA on G7 Motherboard):

Source: Cisco Systems

Cisco believes that its under attack on all fronts by HP:

Source: Cisco Systems

Cisco fears how aggressive HP has become in marketing HP's strong and compelling power innovations, especially because it appears HP is taking away "potential customer focus" on other Cisco strengths that don't include energy:

Source: Cisco Systems

Cisco also believes the availability discussion is winning deals for HP due to the Intel 7500 chipset:

Source: Cisco Systems

Cisco seeks to define what Unified Computing means so that it can then teach customers what it means in order to get them to believe that it's Cisco who's the innovator in this area:

Source: Cisco Systems

Cisco's touting its UCS Manager as its key competitive strength against HP:

Source: Cisco Systems

Cisco is winning deals against HP by demoing its UCSM to show how easy it is to integrate all of the firmware in a customer's entire system in one fell swoop for a particular component:

Source: Cisco Systems

As shown below, Cisco had an "end-of-year server spend promotion" that detailed pricing for Cisco's blade server bundles to compete and win against HP on price:

Source: Cisco Systems