Report: Cisco faces uphill battle to get early UCS adoption

Peter Dinham
Sunday, 22 March 2009 07:52

IT Industry - Deals

Byrne says that through previous public statements and less glamorous product and partnership announcements (e.g., Nexus, VMware), the company had made it clear that the datacenter was to be the jumping off point for its unified communications and cloud computing strategies and, with the UCS announcement, Cisco appears to be finally “putting its money where its mouth is.”
 
The TBR report says Cisco claims UCS was developed using industry standards, however “they admit the system cannot use blade servers from other vendors, and vice versa.”

“As a result, customers who deploy UCS will essentially be locked into a single vendor, creating a difficult tradeoff decision as they weigh the benefits of the system versus the lack of choice (and buying leverage) and potential interoperability issues,” according to TBR analysis.

TBR appears wary of Cisco’s claims to providing a complete datacenter solution and to reduce total cost of ownership by combining its dominant network systems with virtualization software from VMware and Microsoft, management software from BMC and service and support integration with BMC, EMC, Microsoft and VMware.

“While integration of computing and network resources was Cisco’s most obvious opportunity, TBR feels that Cisco has attracted attention by emphasising virtualization and virtualization management to increase the perceived value of its offering and differentiate itself from competitors,” says TBR.
 
According to TBR, Cisco’s best hope is to leverage its relationships with existing customers, where it can find early adopters of its new technology.
 
John Byrne maintains that companies that perceive Cisco as a strong vendor are more likely to consider their datacenter products when they resume conventional purchasing, particularly as they may be forced to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances.
 
However, Byrne says smaller organisations are a different matter and without a large installed base of other vendors’ products, Cisco’s package will have more appeal.
 
“This is especially the case where demand for IT services is growing quickly, as Cisco’s promise of faster set-up and lower cost of ownership will encourage small and rapidly-growing IT organisations to give UCS full consideration.”

On Cisco’s partner companies, TBR says it believes many of its channel partners will value the company’s integrated datacenter solution, which will be “especially appealing to new companies establishing datacenters for the first time and to rapidly growing companies, including cloud computing providers.”

“However, since UCS is a brand-new product architecture, Cisco will need to invest heavily in partner training and support,” TBR advises.