Why Cisco could have SaaS in its sights

It appears that bloggers are writing more about Cisco and cloud computing than Cisco itself is. In his aptly named Cloud Computing blog, Chirag Mehta, an architect and design and innovation strategist with SAP raises the issue that Cisco could partner with a cloud vendor to offer richer network management. He also believes that Cisco could aquire a couple of key SaaS players to offer network-managed services.

He writes:

Imagine a network virtualization switch that is not only capable of connecting data centers at high speed for real-time mirroring and backups but can also tap into the cloud for better network analysis. The routing protocols and network topology analysis require massive parallel processing that can be delivered from the cloud. This could lead to improvisation of many network and real-time voice and data management scenarios that otherwise wouldn't have been possible. Cisco's partnership with a cloud vendor could lead to some interesting offerings - think of it as network virtualization on steroids.

He adds:

On-demand and SaaS have traditionally been considered a software and utility play. The networking companies already support the data centers that provision SaaS services but they could go well beyond that to provide Networking SaaS that provisions, monitors, and maintains the networks as true SaaS offering and not just as a managed service. This could include everything from network management, security, and related services. Traditionally SIs and partners have played this role but networking companies could see this as an adjacency and jump into it since it is a natural extension from hardware to data center to managed services to a SaaS delivery. Instead of selling to a service provider who sells services to customers an effective SaaS can turn the model upside down by partnering with service providers instead of selling to them and sell to an ever growing long tail of consumers.

Would this mean that Cisco would eventually compete with SAP in the SaaS space? Why is an SAP blogger writing about Cisco?

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