Cisco flying into the clouds

Recent moves, comments show aggressive moves to position itself for IT's future

So Cisco has made two recent moves to aggressively go after as much cloudshare as it can get. The first was naming CIO Rebecca Jacoby to head up its new Cloud and Systems Management Technology Group, which is an amalgamation of three previously separate business units chartered to increase the company's presence in IaaS, PaaS and SaaS markets.

And the this week, Cisco rolled out CloudVerse, another amalgamation of the previously separate and distinct product lines that, together, make up a package of cloud enablement technologies. CloudVerse also includes some new software to augment the routers, switches, servers, security and management software and appliances brought in under the CloudVerse umbrella.

Specifically, that software addresses creation, deployment and modification of physical and virtual networking resources; automated provisioning and control of those resources for service delivery within and between data centers; interconnection of separate cloud networks; and collaboration in pri vate clouds, among mobile clients, and cloud-based contact centers.

By packaging new and existing products-and professional services -- under the CloudVerse banner, Cisco is looking to simplify design, implementation, operation and management of public, private and hybrid cloud. Cisco claims that cloud computing, through its dynamic, on-demand IT service delivery model, can save companies 50% in TCO, 37% in capex through shared infrastructure, and 59% in opex from the new management applications. These figures are from a recent Cisco study and assume a large enterprise with four large campuses across Europe, with 12,000 employees using collaboration, private IaaS and virtual desktop services, and their company increasing adoption of these services by 30% each per year.

So if I were Cisco, I'd do exactly what my study found and use my own stuff to achieve those kinds of savings! In effect, that's what Jacoby is also going to do -Cisco's customer facing cloud operations product development and marketing will be driven by their CIO, who's presumably eating her own dogfood. Brilliant!

And in another example of its cloud and data center aggression, Cisco has its sights set on becoming the No. 2 blade server vendor, according to this post in the Hindu Business Line. Cisco achieved the No. 3 position, leapfrogging Dell, in the first quarter of this year.

Citing data from IDC, HBL says HP remained the leading blade server vendor in Q3 with a 51% share, followed by IBM with 18.5%. Cisco was third at 10% and Dell has 7.2% share. Cisco shipped its first Unified Computing System blade server platform in June, 2009.

Despite IBM having almost double Cisco's share, Cisco is within "sitting distance" of the No. 2 position in blade servers, a Cisco official told HBL. Demand, of course, is being driven by cloud - in that Cisco study, the company found that global cloud computing traffic will grow 12-fold from now to 2015, a 66% CAGR.

Cisco estimates that cloud is 11% of data center traffic, growing to more than 33% of the total by 2015.

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• Virtualization
• Cloud Computing
• blade servers
• Cisco Unified Computing System
• Rebecca Jacoby