Give away
Yea, if you measure success by having to give it away. After you buy a core switch, they throw in a blade chassis for free...
The jury is still out as to whether Cisco Systems' foray into servers hasn't done more harm than good to its overall business, but one thing seems certain: the business is growing. Cisco's iron is competing and the Unified Computing System blade and rack servers cannot be called a failure. Earlier this month, Cisco added its …
Agree with AC above - easy to give away a bit of kit with a high margin core switch.. Anyone looked at the numbers? 10k customers, and IDC (or someone like them) has said 107 units shipped - that's 10 per customer, so either they're really small, or they're not exactly betting the farm on the stuff
I am not familiar with a single UCS customer that purchased the systems. Cisco seems to give away one chassis for free with every Nexus buy.... In the same sense fishermen give away a free worm to the fish. I think all of this talk from Cisco about "reducing data center costs" is hilarious. Does anyone actually believe that nonsense? They sell the highest price items in the data center (Cisco networking) at about 10x the profit margins of their x86 server competitors. If they wanted to reduce costs in the data center they would be selling Juniper. It is pretty amazing that they have been able to keep as much networking market share as they have after declaring war on basically all of their former partners.
> The jury is still out as to whether Cisco Systems' foray into servers hasn't done more harm than good to its overall business
We all know it's done more harm than good.... they pissed off HP, IBM and Dell and now they push their own cheaper networking kit instead of high GP Cisco. Overall a dumb move.