Cisco promises gold in California rush

Channel split

The UCS B-Series blades and the stand-alone C-Series racks are going to go through slightly different channels, much as Cisco's Nexus 2000, 5000, and 7000 converged switches also go through a different channel from the UCS box, which includes variations of these converged switches.

Growdon explained that the UCS boxes would be sold by channel partners who have a special certification known as Advanced Technology Provider. He did not divulge how many ATP partners Cisco has, but he said that they were looking forward to doing the complex assessments and integration engagements that putting in UCS gear entails and added that a certain amount of business process transformation work would also need to be done because the UCS architecture is different from having silos of networking, servers, and storage. The ATP certification will take about 90 hours of training from Cisco, which is a pretty serious commitment, but then again, the margins on UCS are expected to be pretty high too.

For the C-Series rack servers, Cisco is not expecting that companies will necessarily start converging their networks, but instead will want to buy servers that can plug into a UCS framework at some future date. To that end, the partners peddling the C-Series servers need to have some familiarity with UCS, but not the same depth of knowledge. And to that end, Cisco has created something called the Authorized Partner Program, or APP, that will build upon the sales channel it has been building for its converged switch products, known as the Data Center Network Infrastructure specialization.

Cisco launched the DCNI certification about a year ago when its converged switches came out, and it has 300 partners certified and another 200 in the works. Growdon said that the DCNI practice is the fastest growing certification in the company's history, and this is significant only because 500 partners will be able to take an additional 12 hours of training to get the APP certification and then start peddling the C-Series boxes.

At this rate, by early next year, Cisco could have well over 1,000 certified server partners. But here's the interesting bit. According to Growdon, 70 per cent of the partners who have the DCNI certification are already selling servers made by another of the big server makers. "Our partners are the right partners," Growdon declared. Well, they are from Cisco's point of view, if they end up peddling C-Series racks instead of rack servers or blade servers made by Hewlett-Packard, Dell, IBM, Sun Microsystems, or Fujitsu.

"Customers want choice, and this is a powerful choice," explained Bob Olwig, vice president at World Wide Technology, a Cisco partner that was trotted out on stage and that just so happens to push $350m a year in servers and storage with other brands on it.

Cisco has been tight-lipped about the margins its partners can get from peddling its servers and converged switches, but this is and has always been the game in the IT channel, particularly with systems. Cisco is apparently hiring Jabil Circuit, a contract manufacturer located in St Petersburg, Florida, to make the B-Series and C-Series servers (Jabil is a long time manufacturing partner of Cisco), which has to be a lot cheaper than trying to build the boxes itself.

So how are the beta tests for UCS going and what is the UCS pipeline looking like? Jackie Ross, vice president of marketing for the server access and virtualization group at Cisco, where the new servers live, is upbeat.

"The beta customers have all had good results with their systems," Ross said in an interview with El Reg. While the UCS boxes are not shipping until the end of the month, Cisco is taking orders now, and is thus far happy with the results. "We are building up a pipeline, and we are exceeding our forecasts." And, she added that Cisco has forecasted sales and manufacturing for the next couple of years and has the capacity to keep up with demand should "sales go crazy."

There have been some rumors swirling around this week that chip maker Intel and brokerage house Merrill Lynch, which are both beta testers, had sent their UCS boxes back, but Ross said these rumors were not true and that these two companies were still putting their California boxes through the paces. There's a similar rumor that AXA Equitable Insurance was testing a box and declined to keep it, but Ross was not aware of that deal and could not comment. ®