Cisco ready to take on data centres

Cisco has a number of significant product introductions on tap for 2009 as the company continues to morph from a pure networking player into an overall IT supplier.

Expected next year are internally developed data centre blade servers; energy efficiency improvements across Cisco's switching portfolio; and a new release of the company's unified communications software for intercompany collaboration.

The product launches are intended to buttress Cisco's strategy to become not just the leading network vendor to corporations and services providers, but to become the leading supplier of overall IT architectures to these constituents.

"The network will enable all forms of communication and IT," said Cisco CEO John Chambers during his keynote address at the company's annual C-Scape analyst conference here last week. "IT is not enabling our strategy, it is our strategy."

Perhaps the most important example of that will be a new Cisco blade server system expected next year. This will take the company into the data centre compute space, right up against longtime stalwarts - and up to now, Cisco partners - IBM and HP.
Cisco officials interviewed at last week's C-Scape conference would neither confirm nor deny that this system is in development - its code name is "California Server," according to sources - but its impact will be substantial in the market and on its current relationships with compute partners.

"I've seen the product," says Vikram Mehta, CEO of Blade Network Technologies, a supplier of blade server switches to IBM, HP, Dell and others. "I think I know what Cisco's trying to do. Servers are a $60(£37) billion market. And if you're the size of Cisco - [US]$40(£25) billion - you're looking for the next multibillion dollar market to jump into. There aren't a lot of adjacent markets so they decided to step on their partnerships and take these guys head-on to get a slice of the server action."