IDGNS -- Cisco Systems has talked for years about building a lot of intelligence into the network. How much intelligence needs to be brought into networks?

HAAS -- Customers are telling us that one of the reasons why the cost of managing and deploying networking infrastructure hadn't changed over the years was because a competitor that held a majority position in the market just kept adding, adding, adding more features without lowering their cost, and many of these features were features the customer never used. We will deploy for you exactly what you need, and then we're going to translate that to you in business value that you won't get anywhere else.

What we're offering from a technology standpoint that differentiates [us] is, yes, significant intelligence, but intelligence that enables customers to deploy the network fabric and network architecture in much simpler ways. For example, we've got one management solution end to end. It is all one code base, so it's not multiple examples of IOS [Cisco's Internetwork Operating System], as an example. We've got Intelligent Resilient Framework technology, which allows you to do clustering and virtualization of multiple core switching boxes [and] allows you to have leading-edge performance and leading-edge bandwidth access.

The other thing we're doing is, we're flattening the architecture to much more of a two-layer model, versus a Cisco traditional three-layer model, which lowers your latency and improves performance and bandwidth access across the board, and have the ability to provision devices on the fly, versus what historically has taken days, weeks and months, depending on the environment you have.

IDGNS -- HP is now in fairly close competition with a wide range of companies, including Oracle, IBM and Dell, as well as Cisco, in delivering all the elements of a data center. How has that affected HP's ability to sell its products through the services channels of these competitors?