Abner's Net Net

From Server Huggers to Cloud Addicts:

Once upon a time, IT needed to convince application owners to virtualize their servers instead of hanging on to a dedicated physical server. Now, many IT shops have won that battle, with Virtual Machines (VMs) becoming the de facto standard, and old “server hugger” application owners increasingly sold on the benefits of server virtualization.

With the availability of new IT infrastructures and cloud services that are faster than ever before, a new set of expectations around speed, agility, and time to market have been established. Today’s “cloud addict” application owners expect instant provisioning of compute, storage, and network resources, and business managers increasingly cringe at the possibility of infrastructure constraints.

Ultimately, Cisco has too many data center network products that have enormous overlap. While there are differences between each of these products in terms of performance, features and even reliability, it’s also true that some of the differences that Cisco promotes appear to be shallow. By filling many niches and flooding competing products into the market, Cisco can dominate all product decisions.

In the end, the time spent selecting products was costly. The meetings, research and discussions included professional services time that added 30% of the purchase price of the equipment.