Cisco, BMC Jump Together Into Cloud

Cisco joins forces with software specialist BMC to beef up its cloud strategy.
By James Rogers ,

SAN JOSE, Calif. (

TheStreet

) --

Cisco

(CSCO) - Get Report

, which is facing questions about its

long-term growth potential

, has joined forces with

BMC

(BMC)

in an attempt to beef up its

cloud strategy.

The venture offers service providers and enterprises a prepackaged bundle of Cisco hardware and BMC software. This includes Cisco's

UCS servers

, Nexus switches, firewalls and routers and BMC's management software.

"It's really for service providers to deliver services to enterprise customers," said Joe Wojtal, vice president of service provider solutions at Cisco. "This is going to support large-scale private cloud computing environments in the enterprise space as well."

Cloud services, which offer compute power and storage via the Internet, are one of the tech sector's hottest trends. Public clouds, such as

Amazon's

(AMZN) - Get Report

S3 managed storage service, are publicly available via the Internet. Private clouds, typically serving users within a specific company or organization, help businesses quickly share information and mange internal systems over vast distances.

Tech research firm

IDC

predicted a major payday

for companies selling cloud-related hardware. Sales of servers supporting public clouds will grow from $582 million in 2009 to $718 million in 2014, it said, while server revenue for the larger private cloud market will grow from $2.6 billion to $5.7 billion.

Wojtal told

TheStreet

that agricultural giant

Monsanto

(MON)

is already using the joint Cisco/BMC offering as part of a private cloud. Cisco and BMC have also racked up five service provider customers, he added, including

Telefonica

(TEF) - Get Report

and the Australian National Broadband Network.

Questions, however, have been asked about Cisco's long-term strategy in the aftermath of its

recent first-quarter results

and tepid guidance, with the cloud market cited as a

particular challenge.

Hardware behemoths

IBM

(IBM) - Get Report

and

HP

(HPQ) - Get Report

have both been

ramping up

their

cloud strategies

as is

Microsoft

(MSFT) - Get Report

with its

Azure cloud offering

.

Undeterred, Wojtal told

TheStreet

that Cisco and BMC will use their alliance to take the complexity out of companies' cloud efforts. "We're really trying to speed deployment for the service providers and the enterprises," he said. "The integration work is quite complex."

Shares of Cisco, which was

upgraded by Oppenheimer

on Monday, rose 18 cents, or 0.94%, to $19.25 in pre-market trading.

--Written by James Rogers in New York.

>To follow the writer on Twitter, go to

http://twitter.com/jamesjrogers

.

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