Come Monday, Cisco will unveil its strategy for unified computing.
According to Padmasree Warrior, CTO Cisco views periods of economic uncertainty as the perfect time to challenge the status quo and evolve its business to deliver customer and stakeholder value. “Cisco’s success has always been driven by investments in market adjacencies during times that may cause other companies to blink.”
But there are markets where Cisco will compete with a few of its current partners, essentially IBM and HP. True as that may be, IT giants such as Microsoft, Intel and even SAP and Oracle have queued up to partner with Cisco in its new endeavour. While the networking major’s announcement comes as a ray of sun shine in the gloomy atmosphere, it remains to be seen how Cisco and the other IT vendors leverage their channel partners for projects in unified computing.
At present, there is no clarity on channel strategies even at Cisco’s end. And it certainly needs the strengths of each of these vendors to enter the market and beat competition. These partners will also enable Cisco link all center resources into a common architecture which will reduce virtual data center barriers. Because, that is what unified computing is all about. The compute and storage platform is architecturally unified with the network and virtualization platforms.
But Cisco is not taking names as of now. However, it promises that unified computing will consist an ecosystem of partners. The company has already partnered with VMware for various products, one of which is the Cisco Nexus 1000V, a virtual switch that ties together virtual machines in a data center.
I am sure like me, the channel community will also wait for Monday on what the company outlines for unified computing, and whether and how the strategies can benefit the channel. I am hopeful they will, as I see a lot of scope for the community to participate in.
But wait we must till Monday Do write to me on what you think about the development …