Ader asserts that “Cisco is the “best house in a bad neighbourhood,” as networking faces fewer headwinds than servers and storage, the cloud has positive implications for Cisco, and storage is a natural stack extension for Cisco.”
He says Cisco will seek a deeper level of IT stack integration;
Evidence for this may be seen in Cisco’s acquisition of flash storage provider Whiptail in 2013, which it is now integrating into UCS (servers) for a high-performance storage capability, together with Cisco’s recent decision to sell its stake in the VCE joint venture back to EMC (which sold Vblocks). This could signal that Cisco is interested in making more acquisitions in the storage space in the months ahead.
Summing up, Ader thinks “Combining UCS with its own storage technology makes both strategic and financial sense, in our view.”
Other well-placed industry players from the cloud adoption point of view, as well as customer focus on data security and application availability, are Aruba, Barracda, F5 and Ruckus, Ader believes.
