Cisco Pledges Allegiance To EMC-Dell With New Pivotal Partnership

Cisco is tightening its relationship with EMC-Dell by revealing a new technology integration and reseller partnership with software specialist Pivotal whose Cloud Foundry platform is making waves in the enterprise.

"This validates that customer's investment with Cisco and EMC continues to be a good solid bet because you can see the alignment and collaboration between those two partners is pretty significant," said Kent MacDonald, vice president of converged infrastructure and network services at Long View Systems, a Calgary, Alberta-based solution provider, who is a top Cisco and EMC partner. "It broadens the market opportunity and takes the challenge away from a partner to broker those worlds together."

Pivotal, founded in 2013 as an EMC and VMware spin-off, markets the Cloud Foundry open-sourced development platform. Through the new global partnership, networking giant Cisco will integrate its Cisco Metapod OpenStack-based private cloud software with Cloud Foundry. Cisco will also resell Pivotal Cloud Foundry in conjunction with Metapod as a turnkey cloud platform.

[Related: Cisco Beefing Up Red-Hot Security Portfolio With High-Performance Hardware, Software And Services]

Cisco says the integration will combine the leading managed private cloud solution with the leading cloud native developer experience to help customers quickly and easily modernize their IT by delivering a turnkey enterprise cloud platform.

"With Metapod and Pivotal it says, 'Cisco can not only execute on the infrastructure and connectivity, but also allows me to bridge that into new resources to support my businesses through cloud services,'"said MacDonald.

Both Cisco and EMC partners have been wary of the Cisco-EMC relationship since Dell announced a deal to buy EMC for $67 billion. Partners initially thought the Dell-EMC merger would nix Cisco's participation with VCE, although executives on both sides later pledged "complete commitment" to VCE.

Partners say the two tech giants are defining what markets to partner together in and where to compete.

"They're such significant organizations for mutual customers that as a channel partner, it's great to see the collaboration so where not forcing those relationships on a one-by-one battle," said MacDonald. "On an architectural level, it makes it much easier from a partner lens to be able to support the integration of those solutions when you have that synergy."

One top executive from a solution provider who partners with both Cisco and EMC said Cisco is trying to shed its image as a "proprietary, lock-in" vendor.

"They're doing these partnerships left and right with everybody saying, 'Hey, we're an open-source company -- this is who we are.' And that might be true, or what their three-to-five year plan is, but they still have a ways to go before becoming that open-source [vendor] who can interop[erate] with everyone and where customers can branch out without being pulled back into Cisco," said the executive. "Historically, you know, it's a strategy that's worked for them."

Partners agreed the San Jose, Calif.-based networking giant has changed its appetite to broaden its ecosystem outside the data center.

"What Cisco is doing in the ISV community, what they're doing with big data with MapR and Hadoop – there's just a ton of eco-partners that they have identified and embraced," said the solution provider executive. "They're also recognizing that applications and [Internet of Things] and ISVs are really the growth opportunity for partners and Cisco to grow beyond traditional infrastructures to how do you support business."

Partners said they've just started closing on a few Pivotal deals, but have yet to sell Cloud Foundry. With the new partnership, solution providers say they're now expecting to see more opportunities around positioning the platform.

During Dell's annual sales kickoff event in Las Vegas this month, CEO Michael Dell boasted about the traction gained by Cloud Foundry.