Cisco Won't Take on Amazon in Cloud - Business Center - PC World

Cisco Won't Take on Amazon in Cloud - Business Center - PC World

Even though we are still in the hype phase of cloud computing and cloud services, smart companies like Cisco are already busy redefining their long term strategy. They realize that once customers do move away from traditional data center based services to cloud based services that the size of the IT data center market will shrink.

A lot of companies in the enterprise IT space like IBM, Microsoft, and even Symantec are changing their strategy by becoming a full cloud based service provider, meaning they are providing SaaS offerings as well as capacity (online storage or server capacity). Cisco, however is concentrating on extending their SaaS offerings by improving and extending their WebEx collaboration and IronPort services and it is using it's Unified Computing System (UCS) markitecture to sell their hardware products to whoever wants to build and efficiently manage either traditional data center or cloud capacity. In other words they are not building cloud capacity.

This seems like a smart move to me, after all in the end the cloud capacity will be a commodity and the real differentiator will be the quality, ease-of-use and longevity of the service being offered. Cisco's USC will help the cloud capacity providers to inexpensively manage their servers and storage while at the same time helping the traditional data center customers to easily move towards cloud based services.