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In a long awaited joint venture, Cisco confirmed last week that it is teaming up with EMC and its majority-owned subsidiary VMware to sell prefabricated business computer systems for private Cloud infrastructures.

It's going to be a case of three into one as the new products will be built with computer servers from Cisco, data storage hardware and software from EMC, and server management software from VMware. The integrated systems, called VBlock Infrastructure Packages, will allow customers to buy all the equipment and software they need from a single source.

“Wherever you touch any one of the three of us, we will look like one company,’’ said Cisco chief executive John Chambers,. “This is about changing the industry,” said Chambers The play is $85bn in terms of market opportunity.” EMC chief executive Joe Tucci added: “Basically we are removing risk. This is all about efficiency, control and choice.’’

EMC and Cisco also announced a joint venture called Acadia, which will build and manage VBlock data centres. Acadia workers would oversee the installation of VBlock systems and train employees to operate them. Acadia will start with 140 employees, but most of the sales of are expected to come from third party consulting firms.

The new alliance will take on rivals such as IBM, HP and Dell. “Cisco and EMC's rivals cannot try to counter this by lowering their support for Cisco's networking gear or VMware's software, because those two technologies are so popular with customers,” noted Tim Stammers of research house Ovum. “For example, when Cisco made its move into servers, IBM stepped up its relationship with Cisco's networking rivals Juniper and Brocade, but it certainly did not stop reselling Cisco's switches. This fact reflects the strength of the combined products of Cisco and EMC. They hugely dominate the major infrastructure areas of server virtualisation and data centre networking.”

Stammers commented that the relationship between Cisco and EMC was already close, which should help cement this latest alliance. “The only overlap between Cisco and EMC's products and services is in the area of network management, where EMC has been building up its Ionix-branded business,” he said. “Losing a small amount of Ionix revenues will be a small penalty for EMC to pay if the alliance with Cisco fortifies VMware against Microsoft's server virtualisation software. The latter is steadily becoming more competitive, and will eventually challenge VMware's position at the core of data centre virtualisation.

“Businesses already stitch together data centre systems from multiple vendors' products, but the resulting systems require technical support from multiple suppliers. Instead of this multi-sourced support, customers want the proverbial 'one throat to choke' when things go wrong. EMC and Cisco have promised that their alliance will provide exactly this. However, they have been very vague about how they will do that. That is no surprise, given the challenge of tying together multiple support groups from two different companies.”