VCE will become an EMC business as Cisco agrees to sell all but 10% of its equity stake in the joint venture to EMC.
VCE is the joint venture formed in 2009 by Cisco and EMC with investments from VMware and Intel. VMware is a subsidiary of EMC.
Going forward, VCE will be a subsidiary of EMC and will serve as “an integration point for technologies from across the company.”
VCE’s flagship product is its Vblock Systems, a converged infrastructure offering that combines VMware vSphere software running on Cisco Unified Computing Systems (UCS) connected with Cisco Nexus switches, attached to EMC Symmetrix storage. More than 1,000 enterprises and service providers have deployed over 2,000 Vblock Systems worldwide.
Praveen Akkiraju will continue as CEO of VCE. The company claims over a $2 billion annualized demand run-rate for Vblock and Vblock-related products and services exiting Q3 2014, its sixth consecutive quarter of greater than 50% year-over-year demand growth.
“VCE was created to be a disruptive force by radically transforming and simplifying IT data center architectures, accelerating a shift to cloud computing. It has been a huge success and has changed the conversation with CIOs. VCE’s size, scale and market reach now requires a more traditional business structure. Our commitment to increased investment will enable VCE to significantly expand the scale and scope of its solutions, helping customers take better advantage of hybrid cloud and next-generation IT opportunities,” stated Joe Tucci, Chairman and CEO of EMC.
“VCE represents another example of Cisco’s strategy of aggressively investing to drive key market transitions. VCE was created to positively disrupt data center architectures utilizing Cisco’s UCS and Nexus platforms, and we have been thrilled with the execution, results and customer demand the VCE team has delivered,” stated John Chambers, CEO of Cisco.
http://www.emc.com/about/news/press/2014/20141022-01.htm
- Earlier this month, VCE introduced new and updated Vblock Systems, including the first all Flash-based model. VCE provides pre-integrated, pre-tested and pre-validated converged infrastructure solutions that are delivered and supported by VCE as a single product.
- In August 2014, VCE announced new development efforts at VMworld 2014 for delivering integrated management solutions for the hybrid cloud. Specifically, VCE will integrate its converged infrastructure, Vblock Systems, with VMware vCloud Automation Center and VMware vCenter Operations Suite, and provide technology onramps to VMware vCloud Air, enabling customers with seamless management, workload migration and disaster recovery between their private and public cloud environments. VMware’s vCloud Air is an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) public cloud offering that enables an organization to extend its private on-premises IT infrastructure to the public cloud.
- In 2012, VMware acquired Nicira, a start-up developing SDN switching solutions, for over $1 billion in cash.
