Cisco really making a push
Posted by John on November 10th, 2009
Two recent articles about Cisco have hit home :
The deal between Cisco, EMC and VMware announced last week may look familiar enough on paper. Technology companies join forces all the time, and in the vast majority of cases it never amounts to anything except a press release and a “free” lunch for anyone brave enough to sit through the initial presentation.
This one may be different, though, and it’s not just because of the players involved. It’s the technology itself–the maturity of enough pieces to make everything work together–coupled with a real business need for change within data centers. Timing is everything, and this one looks like a bulls-eye. Good timing is what made the deal between Intel ( INTC - news - people ) andMicrosoft ( MSFT - news - people ) so significant for the PC. It’s also what made the combination of AT&T ( T - news -people ) and Apple ( AAPL - news - people ) work so well for the iPhone.
The business case is simple enough. Many IT departments have been stockpiling technology for decades. Some of it is incompatible, some of it is unnecessary, and rarely does any CIO know exactly what everything does or how it interacts. Even worse, most of it is incredibly inefficient, which has raised the operating expenses to the point where even the CFO has to take notice.
This is why almost every CIO on the planet is looking at virtualization, cloud computing (private or public) and anything else that will simplify the internal mess, reduce redundancy and improve security. And after nearly a decade, all of these technologies have been banged around enough to attain a reasonable level of confidence.
What’s new in this whole scheme is flexible utilization, and it’s been a piece that has been sorely lacking. Amazon’s cloud approach is a great example of this. A customer can provision servers or turn them off within minutes, rather than the usual weeks or months it takes for an internal IT department. Cisco‘s( CSCO - news - people ) approach is to do just that with its Vblock technology, which can add virtual machines as needed and lop them off when they’re not needed.
“Storage is underutilized 40% to 60%,” said Gary Moore, senior vice president for services at Cisco. “And when you go to provision new applications, it takes four to six months. We can do 250 applications in a weekend.”
(click this link for the full article)
If Cisco wasn’t making enough enemies with its string of bold acquisitions and a brazen push into the server market last spring, it’s now picking a software fight with several more tech heavyweights: Microsoft, Google and IBM.
On Monday, Cisco ( CSCO - news - people ) plans to announce a broad set of new collaboration software tools for instant messaging, e-mail, social networking, videoconferencing, document and video sharing, many of which go head to head with similar offerings from Microsoft‘s (MSFT - news - people ) Live Meeting and Exchange messaging products, as well as enterprise collaboration tools from IBM (IBM - news - people ).
Most threatening to Microsoft among those announcements, according to Yankee Group analyst Zeus Kerravala, may be a new online e-mail offering that Cisco calls Webex Email, an integration of the Postpath e-mail service it acquired last year with the Webex online conferencing platform it bought in 2007. The goal: to catch Microsoft customers in the middle of their move from the on-premises to cloud-based e-mail offerings and woo them to Cisco’s platform. “If Cisco can catch users in the middle of this transition, it gives them a real shot at this market,” Kerravala says.
Google ( GOOG - news - people ) and IBM have both launched their own attempts to own the Web-based mail box of the future with Gmail and IBM’s iNotes (See: “IBM Aims To Undercut Gmail“). But Cisco has a new trick: Its software-as-a-service e-mail uses the same protocol as Microsoft Outlook, allowing users to read their e-mail through the same interface that they’re accustomed to, despite the fact that their e-mail will now be hosted on the Web and also viewable through Cisco’s online software from any location. “Users can rip out their exchange server and retain the same experience,” says Murali Sitaram, a Cisco vice president for collaboration products. Cisco declined to reveal the pricing for any of its products ahead of their official launch.
Cisco’s wide-ranging launch extends well beyond e-mail. The company is planning to offer what it calls internally an Enterprise Collaboration Platform, a shared workspace that can be hosted online or within a company’s firewalls for security purposes. The platform will function as a sort of hybrid of Google Apps and Facebook, allowing users to blog or share documents, instant message and video conference.
Like Facebook or other social platforms, the real value of the Enterprise Collaboration Platform will come when third-party developers create more applications for the service, says Burton Group ( BURUY.PK - news - people ) analyst Mike Gotta. Cisco is offering an application programming interface to programmers who want to sell their apps through the platform. “Right now it’s really just a plate,” says Gotta. “We’re waiting for the food.”
(click this link for the full article)
Lastly, the article was fine but the comments at Google trying not to cross ‘the creepy line’ were pretty entertaining
