Datacentres are the most critical battleground between Cisco and HP

HP's acquisition of 3Com, scheduled for early 2010, for $2.7 billion in cash is in direct competition to Cisco, and blurs the market of who dominates what – server or networking infrastructure.

The move will expand HP’s Ethernet switching product range, adding routing technology and a major foothold in China, where 3Com has a 30% share of the networking market.

According to HP, companies are looking to “break free from the business limitations imposed by a networking paradigm dominated by a single vendor”, but then they would say that wouldn’t they?

It is a clear signal that HP wants to sell everything for the datacentre (albeit the lower end of the market and unproven outside China) – servers, storage, management services and networking equipment. HP has committed to running its own IT infrastructure on its own network hardware and software as a result of this acquisition.

Hardware.com has a dedicated team of HP technical experts and will be offering VMware virtualisation technologies in the next month to complement the datacentre hardware product range.

Cisco and HP stepping on each others toes will be interesting. HP is a $118 billion company with a broad range of products and services – Cisco is a $36 billion company with a focus of expanding its whole IT infrastructure offering.