Cisco Achieves #2 Worldwide in the x86 Blade Server Market

Nobody thought the ‘plumbers’ could succeed in compute …

The numbers are in – across the board Cisco is posting strong results and tracking unprecedented momentum in the server market.  With Cisco’s Q3 financial earnings announcement reporting 77% Y/Y growth in Data Center and now the latest IDC Server Tracker results [view UCS Advantage], Cisco is proving to be a formidable force in the compute space. In less than four years after entering a market with very well-established competitors, Cisco has captured the #2 worldwide share position in x86 blade servers*.

The industry has seen businesses shift over 19% of the global x86 blade market to Cisco UCS, and over 28% in the US.  In the recent earnings announcement, Cisco reported more than 23,000 unique UCS customers worldwide, representing a customer growth number of 89% Y/Y.

This is not luck …

This is about the value that Cisco is providing our customers.  Although we develop products using the same industry standard hardware & software as our competitors, Cisco continues to grow market share.  This is attributed Cisco’s unique & innovative approach to providing an open, standards-based data center network architecture and ecosystem that maintains customer choice. We are increasing business value while substantially decreasing the total cost of ownership (TCO).  With Cisco Unified Computing System, we are truly evolving the way customers approach the data center, focused on consolidating resources, accelerating server deployment, and simplifying management – flexible and scalable for any workload.  It’s that simple.

You hear a lot of buzz words around the industry. But when it comes down to the numbers, Cisco is driving real results for real customers [click to enlarge]:

Here is just some of what we are hearing from our customers:

Xerox: “Within 24 hours of implementing Cisco UCS, we had customers contacting us because they noticed the improvement. Response times on some of our MPS monitoring and performance dashboards went from minutes to seconds.”   – Scott Biesaart, Manager, MPS Technology Group

Columbia Sportswear:  “The SAP modules running on Vblock Systems are screaming fast and far exceeded our performance expectations.” – Gary Leonard, Dynamic Data Center Consultant, Microsoft Partner Center

Basefarm: “It’s all about resource efficiency: if server, storage, and network are three different phases, then you spend three times as long on a deployment or change as you would using Cisco UCS. And time is money.”  – Stefan Månsby, Chief Business Development Officer

There are hundreds more customer reference use cases with similar quotes, and these continue to multiply as Cisco UCS continues to grow its footprint in the market.

Cisco’s converged infrastructures, like VCE & FlexPod, as well as the solutions we are driving around SAP HANA and our newest acquisition Cloupia, are continuing to provide the foundation for our customers as they navigate their move to cloud computing and IT-as-a-Service.

This is just the beginning. We are coming – and we’re bringing the dog …

As we move toward Cisco’s goal to be the #1 IT company in the world, Cisco Data Center is delivering on the technology innovation and vision that will continue to lead our customers into the future. We mean it when we say – tomorrow starts here.

*Source:  IDC Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, Q1 2013 Revenue Share, May 2013