Cisco pursues virtualisation: buys into VMware

Stuart Corner
Monday, 30 July 2007 09:54

Business IT - Technology

Hot on the heels of John Chambers' recent discussions on virtualisation, Cisco is buying 1.6 percent of leading virtualisation software company and EMC subsidiary, VMware. Percentage-wise the stake is small, but it indicates that Cisco's ambitions for virtualisation are large.

The move comes ahead of a planned IPO of VMware and follows Intel taking 2.5 percent earlier this month. Subject to the usual approvals, Cisco will pay $US150 million to EMC for approximately 1.6 percent of VMware (however it will have voting power of less than one percent). VMware says it has agreed to consider the appointment of a Cisco executive to VMware's board of directors at a future date.

Cisco and VMware are certainly both singing from the same virtualisation song sheet. At his recent media roundtable in Europe, Cisco CEO, John Chambers, said he would not have got into the consumer market (by buying Linksys and, later Scientific Atlanta) "if I did not see the virtualisation of processors, of storage and even applications over time into the home and you [the user] not caring where it is. We think that will happen."

VMware's website quotes the company's chief scientist, Mendel Rosenblum, saying: "In the coming years, virtual machines will move beyond their simple provisioning capabilities and beyond the machine room to provide a fundamental building block for mobility, security and usability on the desktop."

The two companies say the purchase "is intended to strengthen inter-company collaboration towards accelerating customer adoption of VMware virtualisation products with Cisco networking infrastructure and the development of customer solutions that address the intersection of virtualisation and networking technologies."

Through improved coordination and integration of networking and virtualised infrastructure, the companies intend to "foster solutions for enhanced data centre optimisation and extend the benefits of virtualisation beyond the data centre to remote offices and end-user desktops."