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HP and Cisco Take Different Paths To SDN: Page 3 of 3

He said it's very obvious to everyone that something's going on here, and the question is how to react to it in a way that everybody can live with. "When you have a big company like Cisco, you've got to socialize those kinds of things." Meyer added that he was pushing people inside Cisco "to start thinking about it."

Responding to the same question on Thursday, HP's Saar Gillai, VP of the Advanced Technology Group within the networking division, replied that OpenFlow/SDN is not a "commodity play."

"This is a simplification play," he said. "If you look at where HP is deployed today, we're solving customer problems. If you look historically when things like this have happened, typically the same vendor who is providing the value in one place is now providing value some place else."

Cisco did not reply to a request for comment for this story, but the story will be updated when and if the company does.

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