South Pacific technology distribution giant Distribution Central has fired a short across Cisco’s bow declaring Aruba Networks its “most serious competitor ever”.
Distribution Central chief sales officer Andrew Assad told attendees at Aruba Network’s Atmosphere event on the Gold Coast today that Cisco was consistently losing ground to Hewlett Packard’s newly acquired network provider.
“Cisco always [plays] the political card and we hear it from our partners and we hear it from Aruba and they tell us what’s going on. It gets pretty nasty but Cisco usually takes that argument to something that they think they can win.
“They talk about their end-to-end solution, they talk about what they can deliver that Aruba can’t – that’s all changing now. We’re in a different world now and it’s clear to me that in this new HP-Aruba world this is easily the most serious competitor to Cisco ever,” Assad said.
Aruba announced this week that it had picked a handful of new supplier contracts with retailer Dick Smith, Crown Resorts, the University of Tasmania and Melbourne’s Federation Square authority, Fed Square.
Among the more controversial of Mr Assad’s views was his argument that proof-of-concept was losing fashion among Distribution Central’s partners. He said that they had already invested heavily in achieving trusted status and that in basic infrastructure there was “a move away from POCs”.
“We’re finding that pre-sales engagement is getting more expensive. We’ve got a lot of partners in the high-end that can’t run a proof-of-concept. They can’t run a proof-of-concept because they can’t engage their pre-sales people without a purchase order and they can’t engage their delivery people without a purchase order. They’re stuck in the middle,” he said.
“These things start at six and seven thousand dollars just to set up an engagement,” he added.
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