10/3/2005 -- Hewlett-Packard Co.’s ProCurve ambitions got a much-needed shot in the arm last week with the introduction of the ProCurve InterConnect Fabric Switch 8100fl family of switches, an upgrade to HP’s Identity Driven Manager, a new ProCurve Mobility Manager 1.0 product, and the Power-over-Ethernet-ready ProCurve Switch 2600-8-PWR with Gigabit Uplink.

The big takeaway from last week’s ProCurve product dump, analysts say, is that HP suddenly has a much bigger stake in its ProCurve line’s fortunes.

After all, the products HP announced last week are the first-ever ProCurve offerings designed exclusively around in-house technologies. But while HP’s ProCurve gambit is ambitious in both scope and strategy -- the company touts an edge-centered vision of network security that contrasts sharply with that of both Cisco and Nortel, which target the network core -- it isn’t without risk, too.

"[T]hese products represent the culmination and fruit of HP’s investment in Riverstone’s switching technology," write Joel Conover and Steven Schuchart, analysts with consultancy Current Analysis. "[W]hile these new switches give HP a solution that is entirely developed using internal HP resources, the products, in the first-generation form, actually fall short of ProCurve’s existing offerings in terms of density and feature functionality, and these new products don’t carry the compelling price/performance/density advantage that made the original HP ProCurve products so appealing to cost-conscious customers."

The good news, write Conover and Schuchart, is that HP’s strategy isn’t a paper tiger: It can legitimately marshal a ProCurve solution stack that delivers on its "command from the center, control at the edge" vision. "That architecture implies a smart, intelligent edge and a fast but less complex core network. HP has developed the necessary components to realize its architectural vision, but it is unclear whether this 'less intelligent' core carries any real price advantage over competing solutions with broadly distributed intelligence," they write. "Certainly HP can compare to advanced technologies such as integrated intrusion prevention such as that which Cisco and Nortel offer, claiming that its technology is cleaner and simpler, but with a greater than 30 percent uptake on services modules [in Cisco’s case], it seems that customers are buying into the concept of defending the network from the core."

And that’s the danger for HP, the pair note. "Not only is the product competitively deficient out of the gate, but ProCurve’s adaptive edge flies in the face of the very big marketing budgets of the incumbents with a set of concepts that sound good on paper, but don’t deliver any apparent capital savings when the architecture is implemented," they conclude. -Stephen Swoyer