HP ANZ moves to exploit 3Com acquisition

Stuart Corner
Monday, 30 August 2010 12:43

IT Industry - Strategy

Following its acquisition of 3Com in April HP has revamped its networking product line and, in Australia, has announced new appointments as it merges the former 3Com enterprise networking business and channel programmes.

The merged company has also received favourable reports from Gartner for its positioning and performance in the enterprise networking market.

Kevin Rooney has been appointed director of HP Enterprise Storage, Servers and Networking (ESSN) in the South Pacific region (Australia and New Zealand), based in Sydney, and Darren Read was recently named director of HP Networking for ANZ.

Rooney will oversee and be responsible for HP's portfolio of storage, servers and networking, described as "the cornerstones of HP's Converged Infrastructure strategy." He will report to Paul Brandling, vice president and managing director of HP South Pacific. He was most recently director of ESSN National Partners with HP in the US.

Read will be responsible for the expanded HP Networking portfolio, which comprises the former HP ProCurve and former 3Com products. He will be based in Sydney and will report to Paul Robson, the recently appointed vice president and general manager of HP Networking, Asia Pacific and Japan. Read was previously services sales leader within HP's Technology Services division.

An HP spokeswoman explained the distinction between the roles of Rooney and Read by saying: "Kevin is responsible for taking the Converged Infrastructure story to market through the HP marketing, sales and partner organisations. Darren is responsible for driving market growth and business development of the new HP Networking portfolio, within the Converged Infrastructure strategy.

"Kevin and Darren are director level peers to bring focus to the importance of the Network component of HP's Converged Infrastructure and they provide the flexibility to meet our partners and customers needs."

Read told iTWire that HP's enterprise networking products were now marketed as the A Series for clients with large complex deployments, the E Series for mid-sized clients and the V Series for SMBs, with the A series being products of the former Huawei 3Com joint venture, H3C, and the E Series being those previously marketed under the HP ProCurve brand. Also, security products from 3Com subsidiary Tipping Point have been branded the HP S Series.

CONTINUED