HP's value proposition is "second to none," he said. Still, he admitted HP does have to do a better job of marketing its products.

Hewlett-Packard has been aggressively going after Cisco in the past two years, including a promotion that started in December offering organizations a 20 per cent discount on HP A- and E-series switches for trading in certain models of Cisco Catalyst switches. That offer will continue for the rest of this year, Haas said.

In all, during the conference Haas stoutly defended HP's strategies.

Told that an industry analyst believes the company is behind schedule on integrating 3Com's China-based H3C network equipment division, Haas sloughed it off. "If we're behind anything it's communicating to the world all the technology we have."

He also pushed aside an analyst's complaint that the networking division has a number of overlapping lines. "In any acquisition there's going to be some overlap," Haas said. But, he pointed out, when HP issued a consolidated product roadmap for the added 3Com/Tipping Point/H3C products, no gear or software was chopped.