Cisco and EMC join forces against everybody

It looks more and more like EMC and Cisco and preparing to go into direct competition with their cloud service partners with an offering called vBlock.  The spin on this is that they are figuring out a way to sell their products together along with VMware's, but the back spin is that they will also sell their technology as infrastructure as a service.  There would appear to be plenty of room in the Cloud for everybody, but if you are a cloud service provider, how trusting do you want to be?   Here's a few quotes I've read today:

The products will be sold directly to data centers. Or, for those who would rather just get it cloud-style, with a bill based on utilization and have someone else actually run it, EMC and Cisco are setting up a joint venture to peddle vBlock on an infrastructure as a service cloud.

We expect the official announcement before publishing further comments, but it’s clear that this joint venture is going to modify the landscape in some serious way.

One part of the partnership calls for the two companies to form a joint venture that will sell vBlock as a hosted service. Customers can pay for that service based on the amount of computing power and storage that they need, accessing it via the Internet.

Trust: There is also some sort of loss of trust with the economic downturn and much of those scandals that is making customers cringe and hold back to their wallets. “Who do I trust?” is the big question in everyone’s head right now.

3PAR probably doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of launching its own cloud service, but we'd sure like to help everybody except EMC that wants to do it. 

Comments

[nate]

You gotta love Cisco's arrogance as well -

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/16/cisco_california_launch/page2.html

"The one thing that Cisco is clear on is who is signing off on these deals: the CIO. Cisco and its partners are going right to the top to push the California systems, right over the heads of server, storage, and network managers who want to protect their own fiefdoms. "It will be an executive engagement," Chambers said."

--

EMC is similar..

[Chuck Hollis]

Wow, Marc -- I haven't seen you this worked up in a long time! "Cisco and EMC Join Forces Against Everybody".

You'd think you were threatened, or something.

I think we all ought to wait until there's some sort of official announcement, rather than rebreathing all the speculation that's out there.

It's a lot easier to discuss facts, rather than rumors, wouldn't you agree?

-- Chuck

[marc farley]

Chuck, seeing as how 3PAR competes with EMC, this sort of business venture could certainly be a threat to us - despite the challenges of managing pricing, profits and deal-details across Cisco, EMC and VMware. There is plenty of risk to go around.

What's compelling about this rumor is that it could be threatening to EMC's, Cisco's and VMware's customers as well their competitors. I don't think we'll know the facts for some time - there are multiple versions of the facts where industry power plays are concerned.