"Users are saying their networks are overly complicated, proprietary, expensive, and they are held hostage with no choices," Haas said. "There's no reason there can't be change driven by industry standards that puts customers back in control. There needs to be a catalyst though, with the willpower to make that change in the industry. HP is going to be that driving force."

To that end, HP ProCurve is expected to expand its data center switching arsenal with a 48-port top-of-rack 10G Ethernet switch; a data center approaching or exceeding 100Gbps per slot; and FibreChannel over Ethernet (possibly via a deal with Brocade).

Separately, longtime Cisco rival 3Com was back at Interop for the first time in four years displaying its three brands: 3Com small business gear, H3C enterprise equipment and Tipping Point security tools. On the network equipment front, 3Com, like HP, stressed the opportunity to appeal to customers looking to do more with less.

This year's Interop was also a reflection on broad industry trends beyond classic networking, including cloud computing and mobile devices in the enterprise.

Interop included the Enterprise Cloud Summit show-within-a-show to focus on the huge industry movement around the concept of turning physical data center assets and resources into a virtualized service infrastructure. Merrill Lynch last year called cloud computing a $100 billion opportunity, one that's being chased aggressively by traditional network and computing players such as Cisco, IBM and HP, as well as less traditional Interop sponsors such as Amazon. VMware, , HP and other executives were featured in cloud-themed keynote presentations.