Acadia: Discontinued SUV or Vehicle for Cisco's Success?

Now that the marketing dust is beginning to settle, we can take a closer look at Acadia, the new JV from Cisco, EMC and VMware - analyzing the move and what it really is/means. There seem to be 3 major objectives to the strategy:

1. Accelerate mainstreaming of the unified computing market & adoption of hardware from the respective players, taking advantage of the relative weaknesses of HP, IBM and Dell who haven't a credible response.
2. Align the otherwise independent Integrators (Accenture, TATA, etc) against EDS (HP), Perot (Dell) and IBM.
3. Create a vehicle (the JV) to recognize, separate and share revenues that come from Acadia.

I’ll address each of these points in separate blogs, starting with the first point in this posting, and then summarize the series with the last.

Point one is as obvious as you might guess. Cisco UCS is so darn complex to design, implement and support that the channel is rejecting it. No channel support means revenues won’t scale quickly. Since Cisco doesn’t have time to wait for the channel to ‘get it’, Acadia is going to step in and do all the designing, implementating and servicing of UCS sales. This will effectively make value added resellers more like sales agents. The launch offerings seem to embrace the notion that the channel needs easier solutions too. Did you notice that the difference between all of those Vblock configurations was essentially the size of the associated EMC storage?

Resellers thrive on the professional services associated with hardware sales, so I’m pretty darn sure that they’re not going to see the Acadia offerings as very friendly to their business. Apparently, having taken on HP and IBM for servers isn’t enough for Cisco. Now they want to take on all of the resellers too!

Our approach at Liquid is to deliver products that are based on OPEN architectures, can FLEXIBLY accommodate virtualized or bare metal environments, and are EASY to implement by end-users and the channel. Liquid Elements is a great example: Intel servers and NetApp storage tied together by a few cables and our software fabric & switch.

Good luck with that other approach guys!