Tech giants Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO) and Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) are teaming up for data center solutions with each company providing sales, engineering and marketing resources.
How important is the effort?
Cisco “doubles down on data center,” it says in the announcement that was made Tuesday at Microsoft’s worldwide partner conference in Washington, D.C.
A recent report from research firm Synergy said that Cisco is the leader in “cloud” infrastructure gear with a 14.8 percent market share. HP is right behind at 13.7 percent. IBM is third. Cisco’s share is at an “historic … high,” Synergy says.
The data is for the first quarter of this year.
The Microsoft deal covers three years, but specific financial terms were not disclosed.
Frank Palumbo, Senior Vice President of Global Data Center and Virtualization Sales for Cisco noted: “From innovative technologies and global brands to specialized channel partners, Cisco and Microsoft have the ingredients to transform the traditional data center. Now we’re expanding our long-standing technical partnership with Microsoft with an aggressive global go-to-market and sales initiative. By providing our customers and partners with greater sales alignment and even deeper technology integration we will help them transform their data centers and accelerate the journey to the cloud.”
The companies say they will deliver “deeper technology integration” with an emphasis on Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS) and Nexus switching along with a variety of Microsoft cloud-focused offerings, including Windows Server, Systems Center, SQL Sever and Microsoft Azure.
“At Cisco we believe our foundational technologies – with UCS as the compute platform, Nexus as the switching platform, and with UCS Manager and System Center management integration – provide customers an optimal infrastructure for their Microsoft Windows Server workloads of SQL, SharePoint, Exchange, and Cloud,” wrote Cisco Vice President Jim McHugh in a blog.
An initial target is migrating Windows 2003 customers to Windows 2012 R2 that runs on Cisco’s UCS platform.
“Enterprise customers worldwide are betting on Microsoft and Cisco to realize the benefits of our combined cloud and datacenter technologies,” said Microsoft’s Stephen Boyle, vice president of worldwide enterprise and partners group. “Now, together, we’re strengthening our joint efforts to help customers move faster, reduce costs and deliver powerful new applications and services for their businesses.”
The partnership will target service providers and enterprise customers in six countries: The U.S., Canada, U.K., Germany, France and Australia.
Channel partners will participate in the offerings and receive various incentives.
More details about the agreement are available online.
Cisco operates its second largest corporate campus in RTP.
[CISCO ARCHIVE: Check out more than a decade of Cisco stories as reported in WRAL TechWire.]
