Cisco virtualization-server challenge to HP and IBM?
Cisco Systems, the reigning monarch of networking equipment, is preparing to challenge long-time compatriots Hewlett-Packard Co and IBM in a market that those two companies dominate: servers.
According to a report in Monday's The New York Times by Reg alumnus Ashlee Vance, Cisco's purported server line's selling point will be its "sophisticated virtualization software."
If so, Cisco will be helping itself not only by jumping into the current mass migration towards server-based virtualized services, but also - albeit to a much smaller degree - by taking advantage of the fact that it owns about two per cent of VMWare, the company that will presumably be supplying the aforementioned "sophisticated virtualization software."
With complex virtualization schemes becoming the rule and not the exception in up-to-date data centers, Cisco is in a strong position to use its networking savvy to bind servers together into one big, happy - and highly efficient - virtualized family.
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Cisco’s CTO, Padmasree Warrior, wrote a blog piece today on “unified computing” which states, in part: “Lately, there has been a lot of speculation by the technorati that “something is going on over at Cisco!” I am sure you have all read the blogs and reports in traditional media asserting that Cisco is going to enter new markets, compete for new business, and build new products. The answer? Yes, Yes and Yes, of course!”
See full blog post here: http://blogs.cisco.com/news/comments/introducing_unified_computing_to_the_data_center/