Professional Documents
Culture Documents
The HP Cisco Alliance
The HP Cisco Alliance
The HP Cisco Alliance
Group 9
Situation Analysis
It is 2002, Bill Russel and Jim Heal of HP are going to meet with Steve and
Mike Thomas of Cisco on their HP- Cisco strategic alliance to discuss how to
make is more effective
The alliance first signed in 1997, was redrafted in February 2002 to expand
and formalize their alliance with greater details
The activities of the alliance slowed in March 2002 when HP and Compaq
merged
HP and Cisco formed an alliance in 1997 and HP was Cisco’s first alliance in their plan to
work with horizontal partners rather than compete vertically
Cisco offers IP telephony, internet network services, optical networking and network
management software
Make their and their partner’s products and services work together
Understand the technology and motivate business unit and sales people of
both the companies
Include all company functions or groups whose roles required them to interact
with the strategic partner
Motivate the sales force to promote and sell the products of their alliance
Organisational Structure
In 2000, Fontana took over both ‘sell to’ and ‘sell with’ activities
After HP- Compaq merger the activities were split again, Fontana
promoted and Jim heal took over as Alliance manager in July 2002
ALLIANCE
GOVERNANCE
Thomas shared that, in
Both Heal and Thomas HP’s Heal and Cisco’s
every executive
discussed the A resume won’t tell you Thomas emphasized
meeting, one must go Consider the executives
importance of Figure out the whether or not that an effective
in with a themselves—where HP’s Russell discussed
understanding the executive’s spheres of someone has personal alliance manager must
recommendation and they came from, what the importance of the
executives in their own influence, which is gravitas—you have to first focus on
ask for an action. Heal their goals are, how alliance manager’s
companies. Heal added tricky in a company look at the person’s understanding and
described the much knowledge they ability to influence
that the alliance made up of several body language and influencing his or her
importance of have of the subject others.
manager has to merged companies demeanor when you own company rather
understanding and matter, etc.
approach meetings meet with them. than the alliance
tapping into spheres of
with senior executives partner.
influence
October 2002
The legal contract had not yet been finalized. Least pressure from the top, because Fiorina and Chambers wanted to increase the
impact of the strategic alliance
The contract consisted of a master agreement and subagreements for each of the six initiatives such as Optical Technologies, Storage,
Utility Data Centre, Mobility/ Wireless Infrastructure, IP Telephony, Service and Network Management
Value propositions have gotten cloudier time has passed since they first began working on the agreement, people with whom they
negotiated have changed and some BUs have changed their strategies
Cisco being the conservative company when compared to its counterpart HP and hence the framing of the document has been carefully
devised
Both the Strategic alliances teams of HP and Cisco wanted the strategic alliance to move forward
HP is aware that the market position of the new HP in the systems integration market is very important
Cisco believed there might be significant new opportunities for the two companies to extend collaboration in areas such as OpenView
and UDC (Utility Data Center solution) OpenView was used to optimize Web sites by tracking customer activity.
Both the alliance teams are looking forward to move ahead in January, 2003 and hence focusing to accomplish the necessary activities
by then