"Clearly, we recognize the value of intellectual property and put a huge amount of resources into making sure we were a have, not a have not, in this market," he says.

Roese is also confident that the economics of the Huawei channel program will entice partners, and that profit distribution will be "a little bit more equal" for all parties involved vs. competitive programs.

One area where Huawei will stay to the sidelines and let the dust settle is in data center fabrics. Huawei already has a unified fabric offering for carriers and service providers; but it's content to wait a bit before pushing it in the enterprise.

"The idea of a customer making such a radical shift in their data center architecture is such a high risk proposition for an enterprise CIO that this is going to take a long time to progress," Roese says. "Let the war happen, let the customer settle down, let the technology mature. Let competitors kill each other, learn what they did right or wrong. We'll be at a pretty good advantage especially when we're not losing the ability to penetrate the market."

Roese says Huawei's interest is more in cloud architectures "on the outside" and gateways to connect into it through access routers.