After Marius Haas announced
the latest products in HP ProCurve's lineup in Palo Alto on
Monday, the division's vice-president and general manager sat
down with Canadian IT reporters to chat about his goals for the coming
year. He's only been on the job for a couple of months, things are
already being shaken up at the staid networking equipment maker.
Despite the worldwide recession, he has ambitious targets.
Before
taking over ProCurve last June, he was VP for strategy and corporate
development, so had a hand in the impending purchase of Colubris, which
brought 802.11n access points into ProCurve. Then in October, ProCurve,
which largely operated on its own and therefore was prone to rumors HP
would sell it, was brought into HP's Technology Solutions Group. Not
only did that widen the opportunities for internal and partner sales
staff to sell ProCurve gear, it also the increased the ability to meld
ProCurve to HP's overall strategies. Moving Procurve into TSG was a
"key requirement I had with (CEO) Mark Hurd when I took this role,"
Haas recalled. "I told Mark we were no longer keeping [ProCurve] in
incubation mode, we were really going to invest in this business" and
get the message out it is an alternative to equipment from market
leader Cisco Systems.
One way was Monday's announcement of a
top-of-rack switch, to fill out the ProCurve data centre offerings.
And, he told reporters, "you should assume we're doing very similar
R&D initiatves today with the [HP] storage guys, and there's
more to come with the [HP server ]ProLiant guys."
His goals for
the next year include "exponential" financial growth, "generating
higher profit margins than an average HP product" and getting a
reputation from network managers of having high quality products. Oh,
and by the way, he wants to triple the head count over the next three
years.
In this environment? Maybe. Forrester Research believes
sales of network gear will grow this year. We'd like to hear from you:
Is ProCurve now on your shopping list?