Cisco retaliation angle played down in IBM/Juniper OEM deal

All that banter about IBM retaliating against Cisco’s incursion into the blade server market was put down this week when Big Blue rolled out its data center OEM arsenal. Lo and behold, there’s Cisco’s Nexus 5000 switch on the docket to be resold by IBM for top-of-rack 10G FCoE applications.

But what about Cisco’s stepping on those big IBM toes by entering the data center server market? Doesn’t IBM what to cut them out of any deals altogether?

Not if customers demand Cisco product. Then again, IBM did signal with this week’s deals with Juniper and Brocade — as well as Cisco — that Cisco is no longer the be all/end all in networking. Juniper and Brocade have some capable data center switches and routers, while Cisco appears to be relegated to the FCoE-specific rack.

For its part, IBM is playing up its prowess as an integrator of all this stuff. And it needs a networking arsenal as customers build out their next generation data centers.

So it behooves IBM to still play with Cisco — even though playtime will be much more limited and structured than it has in the past. 

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