Cisco unveils Unified Computing System, with lots of big partners

Hand-in-hand with a long list of influential partners -- ranging from Microsoft and Red Hat to Accenture and EMC -- Cisco is extending upon its legacy networking heritage by jumping into server, storage, cloud and virtualization markets already occupied by major OEMs such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Dell.

While corporate IT spending is strapped, analysts predict future growth across these markets such as blade computing, cloud storage, and virtualization. Although Cisco is largely new to these areas, the networking giant plans to leverage relationships across its large ecosystem of technology, systems integration, and channel partners to gain customers and contracts.

Through a partnership with systems integration powerhouse Accenture, for example, Ciso will focus on four areas: enterprise applications, especially ERP applications from SAP and Oracle; data center consolidation; advanced, memory-intensive computing; and "infrastructure-as-a-service" cloud computing, according to Don Rippert, Accenture's CTO.

Rippert said as part of today's announcement that Cisco and Accenture will use their partnership to move "mutual clients [to] less expensive" x86 PC platforms.

In addition, Microsoft today unveiled a deal calling for Cisco to pre-package, resell, and support Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V virtualization technology, and SQL Server 2008. The two companies are also working on integrating System Center into Cisco's offering, said Microsoft officials.

Linux software providers Novell and Red Hat are also supporting Cisco's announcement. Incidentally, through a pact with Red Hat announced a few weeks ago, Microsoft now holds partnerships with both big Linux vendors around virtualization.

Other announced technology partners for Cisco's new data center initiative include Oracle, Intel, virtualization specialist VMWare, middleware maker BMC Software, QLogic, and storage technology vendor Emulex.