You can’t turn around without seeing new stats on the growth of cloud adoption. (One of our favorites stats states that by the year 2015, 50% of all CIOs expect to operate the majority of their applications and infrastructures via the cloud.)

While growth is imminent, many customers are still wary and concerned about risk. To both help partners better prepare for growth and help address customer concerns, we launched the Cloud Partner Program with three tracks: Cloud Builder, Cloud Provider, and Cloud Services Reseller.

On the heels of that news, Gartner released a report titled “Cloud Adoption at Risk without Big Channel Investment.” We’ve summarized a few of the key findings and recommendations for partners:

• Through 2015, cloud service brokerage will represent the single largest revenue growth opportunity in cloud computing.
• The channel has an opportunity to play a significant role in aggregation and brokerage services. The challenges facing enterprises building private cloud services or leveraging public clouds are significantly more complicated than just technology.

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Tags: channel, CIO, Cisco, cloud, Cloud Builder, cloud provider, cloud services reseller, Gartner, global, partner

Our industry certainly loves its buzzwords.  For a while, everything was about “virtualized this” and “virtualized that” in the data center.  Then there is a current love affair with “cloud”.  It seems the next hot buzzword might turn out to be fabric.

For Cisco, “fabric” in the data center has defined our data center strategy and vision for the last three years.  With the introduction of the Cisco Nexus family in January 2008, we also announced the concept of Unified Fabric as a fundamental building block for the data center.  We offered the simple vision of a single fabric to link all the network, compute and storage resources in a data center as a mechanism to not only reduce TCO but also improve agility and flexibility.  Since then, we have released a steady flow of products and technologies to deliver on the promise of Cisco Unified Fabric by simplifying the infrastructure with convergence, improving its ability to handle virtual and physical scale and increasing the intelligence of the fabric to increase agility and lower operating costs.

While initially hesitant, customers and industry experts are beginning to see the merits of Cisco’s vision, especially in the age of virtualization and cloud.  Meanwhile, other vendors in the marketplace are left to play catch-up.  In a November 4, 2010 independent report titled “Q&A: Networking Landscape, Q4 2010” Forrester Research, Inc. commented that:

“To Cisco’s credit, it saw the data center evolution way before any other networking vendor and started to build a set of products and solutions directed at a converged and virtual world.”- Forrester Research, Inc.

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Tags: cloud, data center, forrester, Gartner, nexus, Unified Fabric, virtualization

2010 saw a lot of attention, coverage, and interest building up around the private cloud.  IDC’s “IT Cloud Services Survey” conducted in the second quarter of 2010 showed that “those who find private clouds more (and much more) appealing than public clouds outnumbered those who find private clouds less (or much less) appealing by over 5 to 1.”

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Tags: automation, cloud, Gartner, Hybrid Cloud, IDC, intelligent, security

Cisco’s placement was evaluated on both completeness of vision and the ability to execute in the “Magic Quadrant for WAN Optimization Controllers (WOC)” authored by Severine Real, Andy Rolfe, and Joe Skorupa and published in December, 2010.

2010 Gartner MQ for WOC

In addition to our position in the 2010 Gartner MQ Report, Cisco introduced WAAS 4.3 software in December 2010, which provides a rich and comprehensive portfolio of innovations such as virtual WAAS (vWAAS), WAAS central management for the WAAS Express, and improved optimizations for Cloud (SaaS) applications like Microsoft Office 365.  These most recent innovations and significant customer wins in the recent quarters showcase Cisco WAAS market leadership.
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Tags: 2010, borderless, BPOS, cloud, data center, Gartner, leaders, Magic Quadrant, vWAAS, waas

I am sure you readers are familiar with the Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies. On October 7 Gartner released the latest rev and here were my key takeaways after reviewing all the dots in depth. 

“The Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies features technologies that are the focus of attention in the IT industry because of particularly high levels of hype, or those that may not be broadly acknowledged but which we believe have the potential for significant impact,” said Jackie Fenn, vice president and Gartner Fellow. 

FIRST I am happy to see 3D flat panel TVs and displays in the 2-5 year mainstream adoption category, even if they were at the peak of inflated expectations portion of the graph. 

“High-impact technologies at the Peak of Inflated Expectations during 2010 include private cloud computing, augmented reality, media tablets (such as the iPad), wireless power, 3D flat-panel TVs and displays, and activity streams, while cloud computing and cloud/Web platforms have tipped over the peak and will soon experience disillusionment among enterprise users,” Ms. Fenn said. 

SECOND I was bummed to see AR tracking in the 5-10 year mainstream adoption category. Anyone who has read this blog previously knows that AR is something I am passionate about. I just see endless use cases for this technology that would definitely affect the way we live, work and play. I thought some of the recent buzz around AR might enable the technology to leap frog a few years and land in the 2-5 year category along with 3D. I mean seriously I have read about a half dozen articles on AR in the past month or so and from what I see everyone reporting was still in the ‘we heart AR’ camp. A few weeks ago I read an article about a couple of recent AR marketing efforts showing strong results. For example:  Read More »

Tags: 3D, augmented reality, Emerging Technologies, Gartner, Gartner Hype Cycle