Big Business Ignoring Cisco In Droves

(MoneyWatch)  Cisco's designs on server domination lie in tatters on the data center floor. It turns out that it's having far more trouble than reported convincing customers to even consider its plans for a unified computing system (UCS) that would rival other platform vendors like HP and IBM.

Data centers figure heavily in Cisco's growth plans, as evidenced by the huge introduction it gave to UCS in March, and the slew of follow-on announcements and speeches. But getting customers on board with the plan has been a laborious process, as I reported last week. And I didn't know the half of it.

Last week, I wrote that according to a Goldman Sachs report commissioned by Cisco, two-thirds of IT managers at Fortune 1000 companies expect an

increased presence of Cisco servers in the next two to three years.. and that 18 percent [of respondents] said they "plan to evaluate UCS within 12 months.

Today, I got an email from Lee Davis, a Cisco spokesperson, who said I got it partly wrong. She wrote:

Of that 2/3 group of the respondents, 18 percent of customers said they plan to evaluate Cisco UCS within the next 12 months. (That is, they'll be evaluating it very soon, rather than 2-3 years from now.)

Not willing to take her word for it, I got in touch with Min Park, one of the Goldman analysts who put together the report, and it turns out that Davis was wrong on several counts:

-- only 18 percent of the total survey group said they plan to evaluate UCS within a year; and
-- the survey didn't offer respondents the option of saying whether they would evaluate it two to three years from now.

Worst of all for Cisco, Park told me that 44 percent said they have no plans to evaluate UCS within the next twelve months.

Wow. Where does Cisco go from here?

[Image source: Wikimedia Commons]