a blog by Peter Leonard
How does a Fortune 500 company present its CEO to 10,000 customers during an economic downturn?
With a lot of confidence, apparently. Despite backing the wrong horse in 2008, John Chambers is bullish on the economic recovery, as any CEO whose bottom line depends on expanding businesses would be.
There’s evidence he has good reason to believe in Cisco’s performance. Since heralding a bold new assault on the data center last year — going to battle against systems integrators such as Dell and HP — Cisco has proven itself an unexpectedly strong competitor to traditional hardware companies in selling integrated server systems, incorporating everything from CPU to disks to, naturally, the routers and switches.
Instead of building all these elements themselves, Cisco has partnered with vendors such as EMC and their subsidiary VMWare. Put the server, disk subsystem, and network switch into one box and you end up with a “VBlock”, which Cisco will ship to your door ready to go — the Lunchables of the data center:
More interesting than the back-office equipment, however, is Cisco’s new play for a “business tablet” — the Cius. I’ll cover that in my next post.