There have been some rumors floating around regarding the viability of Cisco’s UCS in the market and whether Cisco will continue with it.
My take is that we are talking about a generation 1.5 product and as anyone in technology knows, newcomers to a vertical always have to make a land grab, even if you are positioned as Cisco, a monster in the switching vertical. The question at hand is:
Does UCS differentiate itself as a product in the market?
I can honestly say even the authors of the imminent end of UCS concede that it does. Once Cisco is confident in the market share, which in my opinion is happening at a frightening pace, we will see UCS prices (and Cisco margins) begin to rise. Frankly, I don’t think Cisco field reps know how to sell this yet—again, yet. Once they get the hang of it, Dell is going to find themselves in real trouble in the blade space.
Also, it is a mistake to think of UCS as a server platform: the true beauty of it is how it ties server and network physical management into a single construct with the modularity and flexibility to adapt and upgrade as the standards in both spaces evolve (again, at a frightening pace). The competitors’ management tools usually come at a cost and still do not offer the same abilities of the tools that Cisco is giving away for free. And finally, I would be interested to see how much Nexus has been sold à la carte vs. inside the UCS. I would consider UCS a success for Cisco if only due to the remarkable Nexus footprint it generated, as Nexus is now positioned as the obvious future of Cisco.
I don’t think UCS is going anywhere but into more data centers. Granted, I am sold on the technology more than the business angle, but IT folks are generally willing to pay more for the best and most scalable tools out there. Oddly enough, today with UCS, they don’t have to.
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