Cisco Addresses Rivals at Partner Summit

Cisco’s 17th annual Global Partner Summit was concluded as the company voiced its "unwavering" commitment to partners. The end of the summit was also used to highlight the point that competitors of the company were finding it difficult to keep up. 

The senior vice president of Worldwide Field Operations at Cisco, Chuck Robbins, said: “There are a couple [competitors] I want to talk about for just a minute. The first is Microsoft. I know many of you have Microsoft practices, so don't be offended by what I'm going to say.”

Robbins addressed the point that Microsoft is a close partner of Cisco’s in the data center, and continued on to comment on the future of their collaboration. There has been an increase in customer demand for collaboration solutions purpose-built for mobile devices, according to Robbins, and this may mean that Apple (iOS) and Google (Android) will have a more leading role in this change.

Robbins stated that if this happened, it would not be a beneficial for Microsoft because the software giant is a rival of Apple and Google in both tablet and smartphone markets. He said: “I don't think, at some point in the future, you are going to want to bet your business, or our customers are going to want to bet their collaboration architectures, on the hope that Microsoft gets along well with Apple and Google.

Hewlett-Packard was also acknowledged by Robbins. He said: “Let's talk about HP. They're not even that much fun to talk about any more.” Robbins noted that HP had failed to displace Cisco in the switching market, and went on to refer to the former’s declaration that Cisco's Unified Compute System (UCS) would only exist for a year following its 2009 launch.

He then added: “Let me give you the facts. Last quarter we gained three points of share in LAN switching, and we just became, with you, the No. 2 worldwide market share leader in x86 blades, passing IBM. HP is next.”

The CEO of Cisco, John Chambers, recently commented on the company’s dominance in the data center and continued success in areas like collaboration, and this was reinforced by Robbins at the end of the summit. He said: “I just want to take a moment to thank all of you because we grew our UCS business with you last quarter 77 percent.”

A new version of Cisco’s Partner Workspace tool for partners was announced at the close, and this will be upgraded so that it can incorporate mobile devices, arm partners with on-demand access to training and demos, and assist in identifying leads that are most relevant to them. It is expected that this tool will be released in around a year’s time.

The company’s Partner Summit, which attracted over 2,000 solution providers from around the globe this year, will be in Las Vegas in 2014. (CY) Link