Analyst Relations Insights Thoughts and Opinions on Industry Trends and Issues

Gartner Blade Server MQ and Associated Thoughts

So we recently purchased redistribution rights to the Gartner Blade Server Magic Quadrant.  Here’s what Gartner permits me to say about that:

In the Magic Quadrant for Blade Servers, Gartner states that “blades represent an important stage in the evolution of servers as separate, discrete platforms give way to modular designs and the boundaries between servers, storage and networking become increasingly porous”.  In the report, Cisco is placed in the Visionary Quadrant, which defines “large vendors with a plan to drive market success through technology innovation.”

I relish a good working relationship with Gartner, so I won’t dwell on the report (you can parse it for yourself)—except to mention in passing that I find Cisco’s placement (and the accompanying kind words) the most interesting thread in the report.  Of course, I’m biased.

Instead of discussing that in context of the report, I’ll simply share some associated thoughts about how the analysts (as well as partners and customers, of course) have begun to realize how dead serious Cisco is about the server market.  I don’t really find that very surprising, but, then again, I spend all day long talking to “server guys.”  Heck, I’m a server guy.  Well, actually, I’m a software guy who spent long enough working for Sun to be able to fake a little feeds and speeds.  But I digress.  The point is: the server competency at Cisco is not to be underestimated. 

It might be hard to believe the server focus behind Unified Computing for those that hold their Cisco preconceptions dear, but constituencies across the datacenter are really paying attention—and, in any case, it’s the convergence of compute and network that makes the promise of Unified Fabric possible.  HP certainly gets this—at least if you are willing to see its purchase of 3Com in part as a defensive measure.  But just as I don’t want to challenge Gartner’s usage policy, I’ll leave my comments about our large, fine corporate partner on the brief side.

One final note: I know it’s somewhat controversial to blog about a particular piece of research from a given firm—for which I’ve drawn fire in the past.  The reasoning behind this is that I’m not supposed to be perceived as favoring the research or opinions of a particular firm—no matter what their market size or influence—when dealing with a wide group of opinionated analysts.  While I understand that POV, I also tend to give my audience a bit of credit.  Plus, I’ve always been of the opinion that we buy distribution rights in order to share these opinions and spark debate.  And so I am.

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Posted by Jesse Freund at 08:38AM PST

Gartner Blade Server MQ and Associated Thoughts

So we recently purchased redistribution rights to the Gartner Blade Server Magic Quadrant.  Here’s what Gartner permits me to say about that:

In the Magic Quadrant for Blade Servers, Gartner states that “blades represent an important stage in the evolution of servers as separate, discrete platforms give way to modular designs and the boundaries between servers, storage and networking become increasingly porous”.  In the report, Cisco is placed in the Visionary Quadrant, which defines “large vendors with a plan to drive market success through technology innovation.”

I relish a good working relationship with Gartner, so I won’t dwell on the report (you can parse it for yourself)—except to mention in passing that I find Cisco’s placement (and the accompanying kind words) the most interesting thread in the report.  Of course, I’m biased.

Instead of discussing that in context of the report, I’ll simply share some associated thoughts about how the analysts (as well as partners and customers, of course) have begun to realize how dead serious Cisco is about the server market.  I don’t really find that very surprising, but, then again, I spend all day long talking to “server guys.”  Heck, I’m a server guy.  Well, actually, I’m a software guy who spent long enough working for Sun to be able to fake a little feeds and speeds.  But I digress.  The point is: the server competency at Cisco is not to be underestimated. 

It might be hard to believe the server focus behind Unified Computing for those that hold their Cisco preconceptions dear, but constituencies across the datacenter are really paying attention—and, in any case, it’s the convergence of compute and network that makes the promise of Unified Fabric possible.  HP certainly gets this—at least if you are willing to see its purchase of 3Com in part as a defensive measure.  But just as I don’t want to challenge Gartner’s usage policy, I’ll leave my comments about our large, fine corporate partner on the brief side.

One final note: I know it’s somewhat controversial to blog about a particular piece of research from a given firm—for which I’ve drawn fire in the past.  The reasoning behind this is that I’m not supposed to be perceived as favoring the research or opinions of a particular firm—no matter what their market size or influence—when dealing with a wide group of opinionated analysts.  While I understand that POV, I also tend to give my audience a bit of credit.  Plus, I’ve always been of the opinion that we buy distribution rights in order to share these opinions and spark debate.  And so I am.

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Posted by Jesse Freund at 08:38AM PST

Cisco extends its collaboration portfolio and drives business value

• Significant product introductions across all categories of Cisco’s collaboration portfolio
• Inter-company collaboration through rich video, voice, and presence
• New enterprise social software solutions
• Cisco’s hosted email offering, based on the Postpath acquisition

Learn More

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Posted by Ron Davis at 12:30PM PST

Cisco’s Collaboration Announcement

http://blogs.cisco.com/collaboration/comments/the_new_collaboration_experience/ 

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Posted by Nicole Hall at 10:46AM PST

Cisco WebEx Mail has arrived!

Yes folks, it’s here.  This week Cisco introduced the next evolution of corporate-grade email, Cisco WebEx Mail.  It is a hosted email solution (using technology from the acquisition of PostPath in 2008) which features native Microsoft Outlook interoperability, optimized mobile device support, and browser-independent AJAX web 2.0 access.

Hear details on Cisco WebEx Mail from Duncan Greatwood, Senior Director of Cisco WebEx Mail and former CEO of PostPath: www.cisco.com/go/arpodcasts

READERS:  What are your thoughts on the Cisco WebEx Mail news?  Do you think enterprise customers are ready to move to hosted email?

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Posted by Regina Hoshimi at 10:46AM PST

Live from the Cisco Collaboration Summit

Live from Cisco’s 2009 Collaboration Summit.  Excitement is in the air and there is much buzz about the Cisco Collaboration announcements.

http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/index.html

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Posted by Nicole Hall at 01:57PM PST

Gartner Symposium, Fall 2009

Last week, I narrowly escaped the inevitable, yet all too early New England snowstorms for a welcome respite in sunny Orlando.  Instead of being blanketed with large white flakes of snow, I was ensconced by valuable dialogue and engaged with intriguing presentations by leading industry analysts at the Gartner Symposium

The presentations given by the Gartner analysts reflected some of their recently published research reports.  Throughout the conference Gartner advised that IT organizations focus on Pattern-Based Strategy, Context Aware Computing, and Operational Technologies to maintain system integrity:

1)    Pattern Based Strategy: understanding “how activities, events, objects, and information may form new patterns that represent an opportunity for innovation or a threat of disruption to business operations or strategy.  Introducing Pattern-Based Strategy, Yvonne Genovese et al, 7 August 2009

2)     Context Aware Computing:  Context-Aware Computing: Context Drives Next-Generation User Interfaces, Jackie Fenn et al, 25 September 2009

3)    Operational Technologies: Gartner defines operational technologies as “devices, sensors, and software used to control or monitor physical assets and processes in real time to maintain system integrity.”  Findings: Operational Technologies Increasingly Need to Be Integrated With IT, John P. Roberts et al, 20 October 2009

Did you attend Symposium?  How are you using these concepts to build trust in your organization?

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Posted by Ward Wrzenski at 12:27PM PST

IBM Begins Hawking the Cisco Nexus 4000 Blade Switch

A week or so back, Cisco announced the availability of the Nexus 4000—an FCoE switchdesigned to fit in other vendor racks.  The Nexus 4000 heralded great benefits, not the least of which included the promise of extending the unified fabric to a host of new platforms.  There was only one problem with the otherwise stellar announcement: We neglected to tell you who would be selling the product.

Well, as reported in El Reg today, the first of those partners, IBM, has begun selling the Nexus 4000 (expect more vendors to follow suit).  And, as Kash points out on his excellent blog you can find the Nexus 4000 blade switch IBM description at:

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/tips0754.html

and included in the IBM websites below:

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/bladecenter/hardware/openfabric/fcoe.html

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/bladecenter/hardware/openfabric/ethernet.html

and on the Cisco website:  http://www.cisco.com/go/nexus4000

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Posted by Jesse Freund at 09:49AM PST

Collaboration and Enterprise 2.0

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Posted by Nicole Hall at 09:09PM PST

News Flash: Video Traffic is On the Rise ;-)

This just in….Video Traffic is growing…I know, I know,  it’s hardly ground-breaking news, but when you look at some of the data released as part of our ongoing Visual Networking Index (VNI) Forecast program released today, some of the facts are pretty eye-opening.

What made this installment of the VNI all the more impactful is that a majority of the data was the result of a cooperative program between Cisco and a group of more than 20 service providers worldwide who share their anonymous, aggregated network usage to identify trends, etc. 

Consider, the following:

• About 10% of the world’s broadband subscribers generate more than 60% of all Internet traffic – ok, I’ll take some of the credit for this…have I shared with you the videos of my kids playing hockey…?

• Globally, the average broadband connection consumes about 4.3 gigabytes visual networking applications (advanced services such as video, social networking and collaboration) traffic per month.

• •  This amount is roughly the equivalent of approximately 20.5 short- form Internet videos or approximately 1.1 hours of Internet video, whether streamed on its own, embedded in a Web page, or viewed as part of video communications.

There’s a lot more good data in the study, for more information, there are some additional links below.  Enjoy

• Cisco Visual Networking Index Usage FAQ
• Cisco VNI Usage Site: http://www.ciscovni.com/
• Cisco VNI site: http://www.cisco.com/go/vni
• Cisco SP 360 Video Blog

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Posted by Charlie Guyer at 09:20AM PST

UCS C-Series: Unified Computing Now Delicious by the Rack Mount Too!

This year at Oracle Open World Cisco unveiled the latest server in the UCS family, the Cisco UCS C-Series Rack-Mount Server.  The C-Series, as we affectionately refer to it, extends Cisco only technologies like the unified network fabric, network-aware VN-Link virtualization support and Cisco Extended Memory Technology to the rack mount server world.

There are those that geek out on speeds and feeds and for those I offer the following:

	The Cisco UCS C250 M1 server is a two-socket 2 rack unit (RU) rack-mount server with patented Cisco Extended Memory Technology designed to increase performance and capacity for demanding virtualization and large-data-set workloads
	The Cisco UCS C210 M1 server is a general-purpose, two-socket, 2RU rack-mount server. Housing up to 16 internal disk drives for up to 8 TB of storage, the UCS C210 M1 is designed to balance performance, density, and efficiency for workloads requiring economical, high-capacity, reliable, internal storage
	The Cisco UCS C200 M1 server is a two-socket, 1RU rack-mount server designed to balance simplicity, performance, and density for production-level virtualization, web infrastructure, and other mainstream data center workloads

And for even more product specs cruise over to the UCS C-Series product page, where Lisa will even deliver a quite detailed “video data sheet.”

For my part, I like to focus on the implications over the specifications, and the conclusions there are inexorable.  Cisco is bringing its vision of unified fabric across compute, storage and networking to every corner of the datacenter.  Following on to the super successful launch of the UCS B-Series blades, the C-Series offers datacenter personnel looking to unleash the power of virtualization another choice in form factor.

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Posted by Jesse Freund at 02:05PM PST

Cisco CTO – Up-close and Personal with APAC Analysts

During our 1st C-Scape Asia Pacific analyst event held on September 29th, Cisco CTO Padmashree Warrior participated via TelePresence from San Jose share thought leadership in technology and strategic directions of the company. Padma spoke with our regional analysts across 14 cities in Asia Pacific about Future Trends, Next Generation Internet, Cloud Computing and Architectural Plays.

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Posted by Huey Miin Leong at 12:09AM PST

Cisco SVP John McCool on Future of Catalyst 6500

“The report of my death was an exaggeration”

-      Mark Twain

Nothing beats going directly to the source if you want correct information.  In 1897, The New York Journal confused news of the illness of Twain’s cousin, James Ross Clemens, into that of Twain’s death. This led to Twain’s famous quote above.  Twain would live another thirteen years out of spite.

This leads me – oddly enough – to the Cisco Catalyst 6500 series switches and the Cisco Nexus series switches. When Cisco announced the Nexus series, the rumor mill began churning about the imminent death of the Catalyst 6500. How could one company support two high-end switches? Even a company as big as Cisco?  It defied conventional wisdom.

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Posted by Amal Nichols at 01:23PM PST

Unifying the Datacenter for Cost Savings and Business Agility

Hello world,

Welcome to my inaugural post as a member of the Cisco analyst relations team.  I’ve recetnly joined Cisco from Sun, and I couldn’t be more excited to be working on a host of familiar yet exciting topics like Unified Computing, Nexus networking and FCoE. 

Today, I’d like to share a recent Cisco TV recording that discusses Cisco’s datacenter strategy:

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Posted by Jesse Freund at 02:52PM PST

Getting to the New Normal - Part 1 of 2

“But one aspect of the future is less certain: Will this be a world that is not only more efficient economically, but also better for the people who live in it?”

-          Thomas W. Malone, The Future of Work 

In his seminal book on the future of work, MIT Sloan School of Management Professor Tom Malone outlines how technology and business decentralization converges to create a “new normal” for today’s workers.  For the past decade, companies such as Cisco have been on a journey to address the opportunities and challenges of globalization supporting operational and innovative business model changes that support speed, distributed decision making, and, most viscerally, an open knowledge model for the broadest range of the workforce.

Despite the recent recession, the deconstruction of the traditional media model and the rapid increase in information flows – fostered by the Web 2.0 self-publishing models – changes how much data we use on a daily basis. While information overload is a real and present danger, others are rushing to take advantage of these changes.  Or as the Billy Crystal character said in When Harry Met Sally: “ I came here tonight because when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of the life to start as soon as possible.” 

Keeping up with global value chains and the corresponding information overload appears overwhelming.  Traditionally people like slow transitions: slow and planned.  What is considered normal is a frame of reference where change proceeds in a predictable, orderly, and even linear fashion.  The change we have seen in the past decade, the new normal[1], is a much more disruptive, more adaptive, rapidly changing perspective of work where terms such as employer, work group employee, partner, competitor, etc., take on new meaning, sometimes depending on the day of the week.

In the pre-information age economy – circa Adam Smith—the factors of production were hard assets: land, labor, capital.  Today, intellectual and social capital plays as big a role in nature of an economic system as does hard assets.  Interestingly, two major races in the world economy are being run today: the race for natural resources like oil and metals (extracted from the ground) and the race for talent (extracted from people’s education systems and work experiences). 

As Cisco builds out its collaboration technology portfolio alongside our collaborative organization model, we strive to unlock the intellectual assets of our value chains, both within the corporate walls and firewalls—and across companies to our suppliers, partners, and end customers.   Ultimately, we support building social intellectual capital that can be used (or lent) against an investment opportunity in business.

We focus on helping companies develop speed.  If today’s new normal  is disruptive and unplanned, anticipating and reacting with speed is the new competitive advantage.

All of this depends on people. It depends on a human network that adapts, evolves and works together in the face of changes and disruptions. Collaboration systems of the next decade must focus on this issue. As mentioned earlier, collaboration technology and organization constructs must aid the broadest range of workers and management to access, and not be overwhelmed by, the vast amount of information coming their way. 

Most significantly, companies’ cultures must change, making them more attractive to talent and allowing a broader range of workers and partners to contribute to the bottom line no matter where they work within or outside the company.   Working in the new normal means accommodating a more inclusive and integrated work community, especially in the face of the isolated information worker of today. 

In my follow-on to this entry, I will focus on how technology can also help companies derive powerful and positive experiences in the new work model.   The new normal can be a community, as the great American Transcendalist Henry David Thoreau noted: “I only know myself as a human entity; the scene, so to speak, of thoughts and affections; and am sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it; and that is no more I than it is you.”

—Alan Cohen, Cisco Vice President, Enterprise and Mid-Market Solutions

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Posted by Regina Hoshimi at 01:05PM PST