Cisco’s Unified Computing System announcement signaling its entry into the data center and server market will go down as one of the most coordinated launches in the annals of technology history. Integrator, solution provider, original equipment manufacturer (OEM) partners and analysts from EMC to Red Hat, VMware to Novell, Microsoft to Dimension Data, and Gartner to IDC weighed in with ringing endorsements and support.
The following quotes are among the cornucopia of comments, endorsements and analysis offered by Cisco’s partners and analysts, in the plethora of Cisco coordinated announcements.
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"Red Hat and Cisco have long collaborated in the open source community and, today, bring joint innovation to customers through the combination of our next-generation enterprise solutions…Cisco’s Unified Computing vision offers customers a long-term platform for deploying powerful computing infrastructures."
Brian Stevens
CTO and Vice President of Engineering
Red Hat
“Datacenters are becoming more virtualized across the enterprise, and our customers need a solution with great flexibility and integrated management that helps save them money. Cisco’s Unified Computing System running our Windows Server platform brings all those pieces together.”
Bill Laing
Corporate Vice President, Windows Server and Solutions
Microsoft
"Customers are asking vendors to collaborate to address critical data center needs that will drive efficiency and their ability to do more with less. EMC and Cisco share a vision that enterprise IT will eventually evolve towards a private cloud model and both companies are committed to working together to achieve this.
Frank Hauck
Executive Vice President, Global Marketing and Customer Quality
EMC
"Customers clearly have been waiting a long time for this promised revolution. For years, we’ve all heard a lot of talk about concepts like ‘adaptive enterprise.’ We’ve seen increasingly monolithic infrastructure models cobbled together from existing piece parts and limited by a business mandate to protect old platform investments. As a result, customers and channel partners often have felt trapped in highly prescriptive IT frameworks that cannot successfully manage and operate the datacenter of the future. Working together, BMC and Cisco have eliminated these limitations presented by the inflexible architectures of the past. The Cisco Unified Computing System changes everything."
Jim Grant
Senior Vice President for Strategy and Corporate Development
BMC Software
"Cisco is unleashing the power of virtualization through Unified Computing, the industry’s first unified architecture for the virtualized data center. We’ve built an open ecosystem of industry leaders to help our customers realize the value of this exciting market transition."
Rob Lloyd
Executive Vice President Designate, Worldwide Operations
Cisco Systems
"Time and again, we’ve seen that orchestrating an open partner ecosystem is the most effective way to successfully drive major market transitions. Through world-class partnerships and collaborative service delivery, Cisco will accelerate the industry evolution to Unified Computing."
Gary Moore
Senior Vice President, Advanced Services
Cisco Systems
“Cisco has taken a giant step forward in providing a unifying vision and portfolio of products addressing the market for data center technology. This solution provides customers with an opportunity to finally unify their network, storage and computing platforms under a single infrastructure. This will dramatically enhance flexibility, responsiveness, resilience in the data center.”
Harry Zarek
President
Compugen
"Our clients operate in some of the most complex and challenging environments in the world, and demand solutions that help reduce risk, minimize complexity and support mission?critical applications. Cisco’s Unified Computing System architecture provides a new approach to meet challenges of the next generation data center and enables CSC to build more scalable and cost?effective offerings, as well as expand our capabilities as a go?to?market partner."
David Booth
President of Global Sales and Marketing
Computer Science Corp. (CSC)
“We are excited to bring to our clients the combination of this new unified computing architecture with our many years of experience and expertise in networking and virtualization to help simplify IT infrastructure management and drive down costs.”
Ettienne Reinecke
Group Chief Technology Officer
Dimension Data
“From the hypervisor to the operating system and application layer, Microsoft has been working with Cisco on multiple integration points throughout the Unified Computing System to create a flexible architecture for customers. Cisco’s Unified Computing approach will change data center virtualization by accelerating the adoption of application deployment within a virtualized server environment.”
Bill Laing
Corporate Vice President, Windows Server and Solutions
Microsoft
"By combining these Oracle solutions with Cisco’s Unified Computing System, customers can achieve improved memory capacity, reduced power consumption, efficient resource utilization, lower cost, and reduced risk."
Edward Screven
Chief Corporate Architect
Oracle
"Together, we deliver on a shared commitment to provide a powerful new architecture for mission?critical computing. With Cisco and Novell, customers can experience unsurpassed levels of agility, reliability and performance, regardless of whether they deploy SUSE Linux Enterprise Server directly on hardware or as a virtual machine guest.”
Susan Heystee
Vice President and General Manager of Global Strategic Alliances
Novell
“Together, VMware and Cisco are taking virtualization to new levels and providing deeper integration of virtual, network and compute infrastructure to yield increased efficiencies, control and choice for customers. Unified Computing extends this theme of convergence and, when coupled with the VMware virtualization platform and our next?generation vSphere products currently in development, provides the ideal architecture for cloud computing.”
Tod Nielsen
Chief Operating Officer
VMware
“Cisco Unified Computing is the underpinning of World Wide Technology’s data center strategy and services. It’s an opportunity for World Wide Technology to build upon our rich Cisco experience and extend our networking knowledge to help customers in this rapidly changing data center environment.”
Jim Kavanaugh
Chief Executive Officer
World Wide Technology
"We believe that Cisco’s Unified Computing Architectural approach is an advancement towards the next generation data centers (NGDC). We expect this to significantly reduce the integration complexity and deployment effort."
N Chandrasekaran
Chief Operating Officer and Executive Director
Tata Consultancy Services Limited (TCS)
"In today’s economy, IT organizations are mandated to increase productivity and cut costs while maintaining the IT excellence that provides their companies with a competitive edge. CIOs will invest in innovative technology if it increases productivity, protects their existing IT investments, and demonstrates real benefits that will extend the life of the data center."
John Enck
Managing Vice President, Infrastructure and Operations
Gartner
"The Cisco Unified Computing System offers a clean-sheet approach to solve data center challenges by offering a single holistic solution with integrated management and the critical support necessary for scaling virtualization. By increasing the performance and scale of virtualized environments while at the same time improving the ability to control and manage virtual workloads, this solution has the potential to deliver the full benefits of virtualization across the data center to increase productivity and agility and reduce IT costs."
Vernon Turner
Senior Vice President of Enterprise Infrastructure, Consumer and Telecom Research
IDC