It seems that a long marriage between Hewlett-Packard and Cisco Systems is heading to break up. Yes, the long-time partners appear to be readying themselves for a fierce business competition. Well, that's what the recent developments are signaling.

On Monday, the Palo Alto, California based Hewlett-Packard announced the amplification of its ProCurve networking business, signaling to compete with Cisco's market-leading equipment.

Announcing its ProCurve business, which includes new switching devices for data centers, new data center management software and a novel program called HP ProCurve ONE that optimizes corporate applications for the computer maker's networking infrastructure, Hewlett-Packard meddled into the networking territory that has long been dominated by Cisco.

What is more, H-P announced that a group of makers of networking products, including Microsoft, software-maker McAfee, and wireless security company AirTight Networks, will bundle their products its ProCurve networking hardware.

Hewlett-Packard's move reportedly came as response to Cisco's expansion into data centers by getting into the server market, one of HP's core businesses. According to reports, Cisco may foray into the computer business with a device known as a blade server. It is currently engaged in the server product, which will converge switching, application processing and virtualization software in one piece of hardware.

Hewlett-Packard's ProCurve unit head, Marius Haas did not mention Cisco's name, even a single time, in his presentation Tuesday. It signaled that H-P is out to compete with Cisco. In a interview, he made it crystal clears, when he said, "Anytime you have a competitor in the market that has 60, 70, 80% market share, you're going to run into them more times than not."