Cisco is the world’s largest networking vendor, but that has not stopped its executive team from poking down at its smaller rivals, with CFO Mark Patterson during an investor conference this week taking pointed strikes at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE).

Patterson told an audience at this week’s Barclays Technology, Media, Telecom (TMT) Conference that Cisco has been able to take advantage of continued market uncertainty emanating from HPE’s Juniper Network integration.

“I think that as HPE and Juniper come together they have a lot of overlap and probably their best performing space, which is wireless, so that's causing, I think, a lot of confusion with customers and what's going to happen there, and we've certainly been able to, I think, capitalize on that,” Patterson said.

Those comments come on the heels of Cisco posting robust earnings from its networking business. This included a 15% year-over-year increase in sales, which management attributed to a strong campus refresh cycle and continued strong AI demand.

CEO Chuck Robbins explained that the networking growth was spread across “hyperscale infrastructure, enterprise routing, campus switching, wireless industrial IoT, and servers.”

“Within our campus networking portfolio, we are seeing very strong demand for switching, routing, and wireless products, indicating that enterprise customers are investing in the connectivity needed for AI deployments,” Robbins said during the vendor's recent earnings call.

Patterson’s HPE comments echoed that of former Cisco CFO Scott Herren, who during an investor conference last year said HPE’s then pending purchase of Juniper Networks was causing enterprise consternation.

“I think for sure that's created just a degree of uncertainty and a question of, hey, should I consider if I was previously a vendor or a customer of either of those, now is the time to kind of open up and look at other opportunities,” Herren said at that time. “And we've seen our wireless business, our orders greater than $1 million grew more than 20% in the fourth quarter.”

HPE retorts

Patterson’s needling comes as some analysts have pointed toward potential market share gains for rivals.

Dell’Oro Group in a recent report noted that Cisco’s oft-discussed refresh opportunity could provide a foot-in-the-door for aggressively priced competitors like HPE.

“The major vendors are eyeing Cisco’s refresh opportunity, which is in the billions of dollars,” Siân Morgan, research director at Dell’Oro Group, wrote. “Cisco is doing a great job converting those deals, but there is still a significant number of ports out there to be replaced. Competitors are chasing the opportunity by touting high-performance hardware and AIOps features.”

Morgan’s analysis also noted that the Juniper Networks-fortified HPE was now “neck-and-neck” with China-based Huawei for the No. 2 position in the worldwide campus switch market.

HPE Networking EMEA CTO Dobias Van Ingen recently told SDxCentral that while “customers are scared” by nature when it comes to mergers and acquisitions, Juniper’s wares are a natural fit into HPE’s restructuring into four pillars: campus and branch, data center, routing, and security.

“That means that [leaders of each segment] need to make the right decision for the whole customer base and their customer set. … Then the go-to-market will be enterprise, service providers, and everybody can sell and operate. I think that's pretty smart organization," Van Ingen said.

“From a product perspective, customers also care whether you are going to end sales of some products, and I think we have been clear: we move forward with everything, and everything will leverage from what we are currently doing," the regional executive added.

Rami Rahim, EVP of HPE Networking and former CEO at Juniper Networks, gave the Stateside view at a press conference during HPE’s Discover Barcelona event, which was that of perhaps dubious curiosity about what advantages the merger would bring to customers.

“Many customers are very curious about what we're going to do differently as a combined organization: ‘what are you going to do for me today that you could not have done as separate companies?’”

Rahim pointed to the Barcelona announcements as the answer, highlighting HPE’s commercial deployment of an AMD Helios-based AI rack-scale system as the “perfect example of working across organizational boundaries to create really amazing, compelling value-added solutions for our customers.”

HPE, for its part, has tried to get in front of those concerns by touting what it views as a leadership position in AI that has it head of its networking rivals.

“I think the industry is sort of a little bit tainted right now because our peers in the industry have taken years to try to figure out how to integrate portfolios and we're showing our customers, much to their amazement, that we can do it in a much, much less period of time,” Rahim told analysts at HPE’s recent Securities Analyst Meeting.

Patterson pokes at HPE investor concerns

Patterson this week also poked HPE for its ongoing behind-the-scenes drama tied to investor discontent and the impact that could have on the vendor’s customer-facing operations.

This is based on HPE’s recent formation of a new board “strategy committee” created under pressure from activist investment firm Elliott Investment Management. The committee was formed from an agreement between Elliott and HPE’s board that included the hiring of industry veteran Robert Calderoni to head the committee, as well as Calderoni joining HPE’s Integration Committee that is working on the Juniper integration.

“You also look at just HPE has a lot going on in terms of activist pressures and cost pressures, and I think that they're probably at a place that will strain the amount of money that they can spend on innovation at perhaps the time when the innovation, I think, is probably the most critical,” Patterson said.

Cisco cybersecurity success taking ‘longer’

Patterson did have to take a more defensive approach in regard to Cisco’s own performance, specifically underperformance of its Splunk-enhanced cybersecurity business.

That business posted a 2% year-over-year drop in revenues during the most recent quarter, which CEO Chuck Robbins tied to a faster shift of Splunk customers switching their consumption models, “with a shift to more cloud subscriptions and fewer on-premises deals.”

Cisco had initially expected an even split between cloud and on-premises Splunk deployments but ended up with a split closer to two-thirds vs one-third between the two models.

“We feel good about our security business, but it's going to take us longer to get to double-digit growth then we had originally planned for,” Patterson told this week’s investor conference audience, adding, “we do see getting the double-digit growth. We're committed to getting there as soon as possible.”