Cisco’s the Best. For Now.{2}
This article from Information Week looks into the best rated data center networking vendors, new technology, and what companies are looking to do with regards to their datacenters. According to their vendor evaluation, over 70% of the companies surveyed will “likely have newly designed networks within three years.” This is partially a result of better technology leading to cheaper hardware. Some vendors such as Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, and Juniper the proprietary technology route. Other companies like Arista, Force10, and Extreme are concentrating on cost to performance ratio. At this point in time, Cisco is the highest rated company for product performance and product reliability, but not by much. With changes happening over the next few years, any vendor has a chance to outdo Cisco.
This is important because the choices companies decide to make regarding data application development is directly affected by the options they have from vendors. Companies will take into consideration what language and database architectures to use. The vendors that appeal to the most amount of companies while maintaining a competitive price will have the best chance at gaining marketshare.
The choice that the company makes for their database and network will directly affect how the company operates on a day to day basis. It will affect how fast customers send and receive information for web based business such as Amazon.com. For companies that use database and networks within the company, how secure and reliable will be a big point for vendors to consider. Because cost is always a factor, I think proprietary technology will have difficulty gaining market share especially in an age of open source models.
Marko, K. (2012, Janu 30). Cisco rules the data center, but disruptive forces loom. InformationWeek, Retrieved from http://informationweek.com/news/hardware/data_centers/232500088
Feb 20, 2012 @ 08:16:35
I enjoyed reading your article, with the provided chart it is easy to see that Cisco's competitors are not far behind them. As money being the number one factor, companies need to focus on security and performance to suit their needs. If Cisco wants to stay in the game, they will have to innovate their technology and provide competitive pricing to attract and keep customers.
Feb 20, 2012 @ 09:57:48
Seems like cisco has lots of competition out there. Interested on how this will turn out and what cisco is going to do differently to stay on top of the game. I’m guessing that they need to focus on pricing and reliability first and foremost.