> already had a strong wired switches division

Huh? They had basically 0 market share outside of SMB in the switching space.

Cisco, Arista, Juniper, Force10 (Dell).

Foundry was the bottom dollar alternative before being acquired by brocade, which Broadcom eventually ruined. And mellanox in the HPC space.

I’ve literally never run across HP switches in any enterprise datacenter, including shops that were “all in” with HP.