Cisco UCS Looks A Lot Like Vendor Lock-Out

Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS), introduced today, looks like an attempt to lock up the data center in much the same way that Microsoft tried to establish hegemony over the software stack.

UCS promises to unite computing, networking, storage, and virtualization resources in order to give customers a more energy-efficient system, reducing IT infrastructure costs and complexity, lowering capital assets and improving business agility.

Also like Microsoft, Cisco argued that UCS couldn’t succeed without a broad ecosystem of partners.

Indeed, the company made a bigger show during a Web conference this morning of introducing its partners than it did of discussing the underlying technology, with Cisco executives joined by executives from Accenture, BMC, EMC, Intel, Microsoft and VMware.

Cisco CEO John Chambers noted that, “What you see across all our partners is a trust relationship.”

Given that partnership was the word of the day, it was only natural that Cisco didn’t want to discuss its decision to go it alone on the server front, using Intel’s forthcoming Nehalem processor, rather than partnering with HP, Dell or IBM, not to mention AMD.

When asked about this decision by a reporter from the Economist, Rob Lloyd, vice president of UCS go-to-market and services, urged observers to view the product holistically rather than looking at the individual parts.

“We will be selling this as a system, and that is what is different,” he said.

He added that, “we don’t think we’re competing on a blade platform, but on a system platform.”

In other words, don’t focus on the fact that we’re selling servers even though we are.

And don’t focus on the fact that we’re competing with our former partners in this space, because that conficts with today’s message of partnership.

I had a chance to ask the same of Glenn Keel, director of product marketing for UCS, who told me, “if folks see [UCS] as simply a server, we haven’t done our jobs right.”

He added that using the same vendor (in this case, Cisco) for both blade and blade chassis is, “a common dynamic that people are used to. The lack of an openness of blade and chassis is the rule rather than the exception.”

That sounded a lot like Microsoft explaining that people are used to having the browser as part of the operating system and that, in any case, it’s nearly impossible to unbudle the two.

Paul Durzan, director of product management for UCS, added that, “we’re open to discussions around other server vendors, but at this point it is too early to be speculating on that.”

Charles King, principal analyst of Pund-IT Research, wrote in a note to clients that “Cisco’s Unified Computing partners [was] the most important aspect of the company’s announcement.”

In many cases, Cisco named two or more partners for a given piece of the puzzle, including VMware and Microsoft for the virtualization software component, Accenture, Wipro and Tata for services, Emulex and QLogic for host bus adapters, and EMC and NetApp for storage.

Intel, however, is the lone processor vendor and BMC is its only IT management software partner. Notable by their absences were AMD, of course, as well as management software vendors Informatica and IBM.

KIng told me that locking out competing server vendors would “stick a knife in the open partner program they described.”

He added that trying to exclude server system vendors IBM, HP and Dell “would be foolhardy in the extreme.”

Chambers said UCS represents a $20 billion opportunity, and emphasized that UCS will result in more revenue for every IT vendor partnering with Cisco.

“It’s about, how do we take a dollar and not split it differently, but how we add two or three,” he said.

Naturally, with all those partners and all those new dollars to be made, the last thing Cisco wanted to talk about was locking certain vendors out. But if it doesn’t open UCS to other vendors, lock-out is all people will be talking about.