In 2009 HP displaced IBM at the top of the computer product and services sales pyramid under Mark Hurd's leadership. Hurd is now taking direct aim at Cisco Systems' networking business with his ProCurve line and a $2.7 billion acquisition of 3Com.
Cisco in March announced its plans to integrate network devices, servers, and storage utilities into a unified, next-generation data center.
The move creates a turf war within the data center and threatens to devalue established server brands from IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Dell. Cisco, which in the past has worked closely with server makers such as HP, will now market its own servers and its own software to manage all three unified elements of the data center.