
Who will fuel Cisco Blade growth .. read fully
Those, just out of college kids with a Cisco certification does it with a huge price because they havent seen anything else. And the Governments , most of them accorss the world are one way or other corrupt .
The real IT person always evaluates all the gears and finally buys Cisco with 80% discount ((sometimes at 89% highest i heard of ) because they are cheaper than the chinese gear .
But it will be so different for the Servers . it will be HP & IBM
Currently Cisco Ships both HP & IBM servers for all their server requirments for UC. With the Growth in UC , they must have realised they could get the same gear manufacturered in a Blade format by some third world factory and make same near 90% profit .
Most probably they will give away the enclosure & the software when you buy a UC and try to Push more blades at higher costs when you want to do anything . But Cisco can fill in a whole 10 slot Blade enclosure for a Single UC Implementation . (2 UCM, 2 Unity, 5 for IPCC, 4 for Meeting Place , couple more for Network management ) . Hence HP & IBM will definitely see a decline in the factory revenues and unfortunately they are the one selling this servers to the customers . HP & IBM account for major share of UC shipped from Cisco .
HP & IBM - You do have a way out ?
Now that you got the Solaris on the Servers May be Mitel + SUN thin clients (a Real Phone built with a Thin client ) will be winning story. for all three of you .
With the Dead of Itanium HP also can join the Fujitsu SUN Alliance on the SPARC CPU , and sure SUN can even help you port the HP-UX in the SPARC (if they havent done it yet) . Atleast you save a reliable OS.