I told you
Cisco Systems (Nasdaq: CSCO)
should have kept its toes out of the server waters.
Cisco has always been deeply connected to the IT industry,
and the company's wide-ranging partner network has been one
of its biggest strengths. But selling servers in direct
competition with longtime buddies like
IBM (NYSE: IBM),
Hewlett Packard (NYSE: HPQ), and
Dell (Nasdaq: DELL) is not a move that makes
Cisco any friends. It's an indirect way of taking those old
relationships back a notch, kind of like texting "I need some
me-time" to IBM and Dell.
Sure enough, the industry is turning against Cisco. First
it was IBM that
partnered upwith
Juniper Networks (Nasdaq: JNPR) to sell
IBM-branded networking products with Juniper hardware inside.
Now Dell is doing the exact same thing, once again with
Juniper as a partner. Juniper is like the second-prettiest
girl at the school dance who gets all the boys' attention
when the prettiest one shows up in the rival school's
colors.
Dell says that the Juniper partnership is all about giving
consumers choice and avoiding single-vendor lock-in. Without
Dell pointing fingers, it's pretty clear that the single
vendor to avoid is Cisco, with its stated and implied goal of
giving enterprise customers an end-to-end data center
platform under the Cisco brand.
The minute Cisco CEO John Chambers signed off on that
kooky plan to sell Cisco servers may have been the beginning
of the end. This is not the universally loved Cisco we used
to know and, well, love. This version has enemies outside the
networking world. The balance of power seems to be shifting
toward smaller players like Juniper,
Brocade Communications Systems (Nasdaq:
BRCD), or
Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU), depending on
which sub-market you're talking about.
Has Cisco peaked, or am I reading too much into the
apparent anti-Cisco movement? Set the record straight in the
comments below, dear Fool.
This article was originally published as
Cisco Ain't Making Friends No Moreon
Fool.com
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