Cisco Strategy Focuses on Infrastructure, Storage networking

Storage networking, network infrastructure are hot topics as companies like Cisco, HP, and IBM push into virtualization across the data center. According to this report on Network World, Cisco Systems made a $150 million equity investment VMware, expecting the investment to help spur even more interest in virtualization among their customers.

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"In January 2009, Cisco challenged HP and IBM in a server market that those two companies dominated. In a report in The New York Times by Ashlee Vance, Cisco's server line's selling point will be its 'sophisticated virtualization software.' The company's chief technology officer Padmasree Warrior said Cisco saw the move 'not as a new market, but a market transition.'

"In a press release in March of 2009, Cisco and VMware announced a comprehensive, strategic original equipment manufacturer (OEM) agreement which incorporated product engineering and integrated sales and support strategies for datacenter virtualization and unified computing. The Cisco/VMware relationship began to provide a foundation for next-generation cloud-based services. The press listed one of the key benefits of the agreement as giving customers the choice of deploying and managing applications on internal or external clouds, or deploying them into federated “private” clouds for even greater scalability."

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