There is a new meme emerging from this newly charged rivalry: VARs will find themselves caught in the crossfire. Unnamed VARs are telling the media that they are being asked to choose one side or the other, something that wouldn’t sit well with channel partners who want customers to think of them as trusted advisers, not vendor flunkies.  As one anonymous partner told CRN recently: “We should not be lined up by vendors, but by the unique needs of our customers. That is who we serve. We have to embrace the notion that our bread is provided by our customers.”

Can HP or Cisco really pressure partners to fall in line with one of them or the other? What would that pressure look like? And how would you respond? We’d like to know.

H3C was originally a joint venture venture between 3Com and Chinese telecom networking vendor Huawei. 3Com bought out Huawei a couple years ago, and relaunched H3C as its enterprise networking brand last May.  H3C gave 3Com the technology it needed to succeed in the enterprise networking space again. It just needed a sales channel in North America to get back to where it wanted to be.

That is something that has eluded 3Com. As the Daily Finance blog noted, 3Com has a weak sales channel with almost no enterprise IT VARs in North America.   It mostly abandoned the enterprise networking market abruptly in 2000, essentially abandoning a large number of VARs at the same time. 3Com’s move was a strategic response to the Internet bubble’s burst and the rise of Cisco. Regardless of what you think of that move, there is no question that 3Com has tried and failed to re-enter the enterprise space a few times since. H3C probably represents its best effort yet.

While 3Com has muddled along, HP has been busy building up its own ProCurve networking business. ProCurve has been growing rapidly, with a strong network edge product line and good penetration into the midmarket enterprise space. But ProCurve has not yet developed a winning strategy for data center core-to-edge switching and routing, something essential to competing for large enterprise business with Cisco. 3Com’s H3C products could give it the technology it needs.

ProCurve’s channel partners will be a key ingredient to HP’s 3Com deal having an impact outside of China. No doubt HP will do everything it can to make this work for partners. HP and 3Com are already having internal discussion about how to integrate the two companies. If and when the merger is approved, ProCurve VARs should expect a big rollout of new sales incentives, training and partnership opportunities built around the newly acquired products.

This will be a good opportunity for ProCurve partners to compete more directly head-to-head with Cisco, both in the midmarket and in the enterprise. ProCurve VARs should find themselves more able to compete for data center networking deals in particular, where 3Com’s H3C products show a lot of promise.

But ProCurve partners should also watch carefully to see how deal shakes up parts of the ProCurve business that have been so successful for VARs. For instance, what brand will HP move forward with in networking? ProCurve, 3Com, H3C? I think VARs will hope HP sticks with ProCurve, which has has a good name these days.

Also, what will happen to the ProCurve unlimited lifetime warranty? ProCurve customers love that warranty because it reduces total cost of ownership tremendously. Will it extend to the 3Com product line? Will HP be able to afford lifetime warranties on such a broad line of products? Will it pull back the warranty on the ProCurve product line to any extent?

VARs should also watch closely to see which products are phased out as a result of the merger. 3Com’s Tipping Point network security brand is superior to a lot of comparable HP offerings, so we may see some HP security products phased out. Overlap in the network infrastructure product portfolios is not as extensive, but some switches could be phased out.

Both 3Com and HP ProCurve also heavily tout their open, standards-based approach to networking, but there will still be a great deal of product integration work to do. If customers are going to install both 3Com and ProCurve products in their networks, they will expect the two product groups to work together seamlessly with one management interface. ProCurve did a good job of integrated the wireless LAN products of Colubris after HP bought that company more than a year ago, so that’s a good sign. But VARs need to keep an eye on how this proceeds.

According to the email, Cisco has instructed its VARS to match any price ProCurve offers. Cisco hasn’t publicized this program, so not all Cisco customers know about it.

Apparently ProCurve will embrace Cisco’s tactic.  The company plans to publicize Cisco’s price-matching scheme to everyone. Why? As the email states: “…if every Cisco customer knew they could get Cisco products at the same price as ProCurve products, this would accomplish two things: make customers more familiar with ProCurve (they’d have to call us in order for us to make them an offer) and spread the Cisco sales team thin by having them respond to every customer asking them to match ProCurve offer (and lose money in the process).”

The leaked email seems to indicate that ProCurve plans to officially announce this move next week. ProCurve partners should expect to start hearing from Cisco customers soon. It wouldn’t hurt to do a little extra marketing so that Cisco customers in your region know where to go for a ProCurve price quote.

This news out of ProCurve follows an internal Cisco memo leaked last week, which details a significant internal reorganization of Cisco’s sales and channel-facing teams.

“We compete with Microsoft in UC, and are partnering with them closely in other areas. What was interesting to us in their announcement last week… MS has been saying for years that the network doesn’t matter, their slogan: “VoIP as you are.” They just picked the wrong partner [HP]. That’s why Cisco has become market leader. Interesting that MS has recognized the importance of the network, but we think HP will probably not add value. We’re the best company in the world to deliver networking capabilities as far as unified communications.”

He raises an interesting point. Microsoft is probably a little late in the game in recognizing the importance of the network now, but at least they finally did. Yet the plan that MS has laid out with HP seems quite generous in terms of what they plan to accomplish. A big chunk of money is going into HP ProCurve’s networking hardware so it can integrate with Microsoft’s products, but Cisco is confident that its products are already there. (It’s pretty obvious that the products are there, seeing as Cisco already has a similar UC interoperability partnership with Microsoft.)

The question is, what kind of vendors are partners willing to sell to their customers? When talking to a partner about selling virtualization in the data center, he snorted when I asked if he was ready to sell Cisco.

“Why would I take a chance on Cisco,” he said, “when I’ve been partnered with HP and VMware for years?”

The same idea applies to taking a chance on Microsoft/HP over Cisco. Why would someone go with Microsoft, who only recently realized the importance of a network and partnered with HP, who only in the last ten years made the foray into networking products, over a vendor who built its foundation on networking and has been touting the importance of since the 1980s?

Are partners willing to take a chance on the Microsoft/HP team, or would they stay with the time-tested champion of networking, as John Chambers thinks?