Cisco Announce Ten Thousandth Blade Server Customer
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Earlier this month, communication technology giant Cisco released a statement stating it had acquired its 10,000th server customer. Since launching into the server market nearly three years ago, the company has faced intense scrutiny and pressure from competitors and industry commentators and the announcement has been regarded by some as a chance for Cisco to brag about the growth of the server area of the business and who its customers are.
Cisco entered the server industry in March 2009, with the introduction of the UCS B Series of Blade servers and the release of the C Series in June. The servers Cisco manufacture boast 10 Gigabit Ethernet networking, which enables servers to link to other servers as well as external storage; a system management tool- UCS Manager- that is fully integrated and features hypervisor capability; and virtualised I/O via UCS systems to manage the server.
When Cisco entered the server market, server and storage networking were coming together. Established server makers such as IBM and Fujitsu sold data centre switches with their server cabinet and server hardware that they either made, or purchased wholesale and rebranded and were searching for marketing opportunities to increase their market share. This convergence of server technology made Cisco’s entry inevitable.
It is also arguable that Cisco’s entry into the server market caused other manufacturers of tier one servers to speed up work on networking plans. It is for this reason that industry experts believe that Cisco’s embracing of server production has been a benefit to the industry as a whole, even if the server wing of the business is yet to prove itself profitable financially and could have effected its networking wing, as companies that were previously partners became competitors.
Cisco sold almost 40,000 blade or rack-mounted servers in the third quarter of 2011, the latest that sales figures are available for. The company’s marketing manager for unified computing, Todd Brannon stated that the UCS server side of the business was generating orders at the end of 2011 that if calculated over the course of a year would total $1.1bn.
The rate at which Cisco added customers during the Spring and Summer of 2011 was impressive and although the numbers fell slightly in the Autumn, it is worth remembering that Cisco has existing relationships with a large number of the top businesses around the world that use large data centres. Industry commentators state that even if the company does not sell a single server to a small to medium enterprise (SME), the total market for Cisco servers would remain extensive and would not affect sales for server manufacturers like Hewlett Packard, Fujitsu or IBM or other computer parts UK companies.
Press Release Produced by: Mark From .
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