The $38 billion networking market is about to heat up.
Hewlett-Packard had only 8.3 percent of networking-equipment market share in 2014, well behind the market leader, Cisco, which dominated 49.3 percent of the market, according to Gartner. In March, HP bought Aruba Networks for about $2.7 billion in an effort to close the gap. Though Aruba only makes up 1.7 percent of market share, Aruba has been on average growing 30 percent annually for the past five years and will be key to HP Networking.
There is lots of market share that we can gain, said Meg Whitman, CEO of Hewlett-Packard, to Bloomberg in an interview. We re a No. 2 player. Big difference between us and No. 1—I think we ve got a really great portfolio, and we re heading right to where the market is moving, which is wired and wireless.
New software will allow customers to manage their entire network with a single app instead of different tools, offering packages of products that will work well together. HP will also be revamping its sales staff. Earlier this month, HP and Arista Networks said they would partner to compete with Cisco s data-center products.
Bloomberg points out that the effort to combat Cisco begun under Whitman s predecessor Mark Hurd, who spent more than $2 billion on networking vendors such as 3Com and Colubris Networks. But HP s networking sales have increased by less than 10 percent over four years.
As the clear market leader, we have delivered unified wired, wireless and cloud-managed platforms to our customers for years and will continue to do so, said John Choi, a spokesman for Cisco, to Bloomberg.
Photo: The Hewlett-Packard sign in front of the company s Palo Alto campus. (Kirstina Sangsahachart/Daily News)
