I have spent considerable time the past few weeks in Las Vegas thanks to Cisco and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) both having come to an agreement to host their respective yearly big events in that city, just a few days apart, in June, and betting that no one will melt either outside or at any of the conveniently placed gambling tables. Thanks everyone!

(I will dispense with the usual beleaguered commentary vis-à-vis it being hot in Las Vegas in June.)

Besides it being hot in Las Vegas in June (sorry!), what I took from these “competing” events was the fact both vendors remain hyper-aware of each other and that both are all on the platform bandwagon.

This notion really kicked off for me when I took a visit to Cisco’s headquarters in San Jose, California. During that trip I was able to meet with a number of Cisco segment leads, including Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel, with every one of them repeatedly stating the importance of platform to Cisco’s future. In fact, my notes seem to indicate “platform” was mentioned more times than “Meraki” for whatever that’s worth.

Cisco kept that platform momentum rolling through its Live event earlier this month, specifically highlighted by a handful of systems designed to provide a single point of platform control. This was bolstered by Patel’s move toward integrating Cisco’s years of acquisitions into a more cohesive go-to-market play.

HPE followed suit by running a platform through-line across its announcements, a notion also bolstered by acquisitions, the most recent being its closing on the Juniper Networks deal. And it should be noted that smaller rival Extreme Networks is so onboard with its own platform play that its play is plainly labeled as Platform One.

Bringing it all back together

This platformization move has been progressing for some time, but most notably counters what had been a decade-plus move toward the disaggregation of service offerings. This tearing apart of platforms was based on the growing use of open standards and APIs that allowed customers to pick-and-choose so-called “best-of-breed” services to meet their specific needs.

Fortunately, this disaggregation push did what was intended in that it brought a flood of new entrants into specific service spaces, which resulted in lower pricing and forced many established players – Cisco and HPE included – to upend their legacy go-to-market business plans.

Unfortunately, disaggregation also pushed the need to stitch these piece-parts together onto increasingly overburdened IT teams that were not ready for such tasks or required them to farm out such work to system integrators (SIs), which came with their own pricing and organizational complexity.

This pricing challenge cannot be overstated. Ecosystem executives have repeatedly stated that while system pricing has been volatile, mostly in an upward trajectory, enterprises are still signing on the line that is dotted because of fear.

Fernando Montenegro, VP and practice lead for cybersecurity and resilience at Futurum Group, explained this challenge to me at the HPE event as the notion of a CIO at a large organization needing to define a forward-looking technology strategy that also rationalizes its vendor list.

“This should be the golden age of business process engineering, and I'm thinking about that here in the context of how will HPE and Cisco and others, how are they aligning the technology footprint that they are delivering with the mind of that CIO, who is, OK, ‘I need to solve a business problem,’” Montenegro said. “That business problem obviously requires technology, that obviously requires an AI substrate. But what my board is asking me is not about technology, it's about that business problem. So I think that that is the nut I would say that every one of those vendors at the table needs to crack.”

Montenegro then pulled that lens back and noted enterprise surveys conducted by Futurum Group repeatedly show that what enterprise IT leaders want from a platform is “ease of integration … even more than cost optimization.”

Equity research firm William Blair highlighted this position in a recent enterprise report on Microsoft where it noted a trend of enterprises wanting to take that vendor’s package of security services instead of piecing together their own systems.

“This dynamic has elevated platform-oriented conversations, particularly among customers looking for predictable pricing, fewer vendors, and higher operational simplicity,” the firm wrote. “As a result, Microsoft’s extensive platform breadth, deep bundling, and ‘good enough’ feature set have become increasingly difficult for customers to ignore as they grapple with intensifying budget trade-offs within an increasingly complex and inflationary IT environment.”

Platform is where it's headed

And thus this platform push.

Now the challenge will be in how well these platform pushers can provide a compelling package that meets all of an enterprise’s integration needs while also meeting that cost optimization target as well.

Some of this is being tackled through deep changes in go-to-market partner programs that have shifted compensation focuses to partners willing to invest in tighter integration packages with specific vendors, a task that is being somewhat upset by a volatile pricing environment.

However, more broadly, this challenge could come down to market positioning, something that Andre Kindness, principal analyst at Forrester Research, recently noted networking-focused vendors like Cisco, HPE, and Extreme are still working through.

“With HPE’s acquisition of Juniper, there’s now a large gap in the LAN market outside the data center that needs to be filled. HPE will be busy for a while rationalizing product lines, reworking software to support its GreenLake‑driven data center ambitions, and integrating two large portfolios,” Kindness wrote. “Cisco, meanwhile, is still ironing out complexity across Meraki, Catalyst, and its WAN products – and the growing demand for sovereignty‑focused solutions won’t make that any easier. Extreme is well positioned with Platform One to do in office buildings and remote sites what Arista did in the data center, becoming the juggernaut and lighthouse for the market.”

Kindness concluded in his post that, “the takeaway is simple: Platforms aren’t new, but this time, they’re real. And that changes where networking competition is headed.”

How this plays out in the market remains to be seen, but vendors are betting that these platform moves are in the cards and customers are willing to go to extreme lengths – see Las Vegas in June – to hit.