Don’t count Cisco out yet.  The consumer electronics and networking giant, after suffering hurtful losses and setbacks in recent weeks, Cisco still tries to rebound and turn things around. But will this new-found NetApp love be all that Cisco has been waiting for? Or is Cisco breaking up with EMC’s VMware? It’s a yes and no for now, respectively.  These reports surfaced following Cisco and NetApp joint project, the FlexPod—a converged infrastructure architecture.

Guess this could be a strategy that Cisco may employ to get back its feet on the cloud. It’s pretty niche in its cloud offerings, focused on network solutions like switches, not cloud services, etc., so it needs to partner with companies like EMC that have a more comprehensive suite of solutions in order to offer the full range of cloud computing services to Cisco clients.  Clearly, the company is leveraging the support of both NetApp’s FlexPod and EMC’s VMware Vblock. Cisco has also been involved in some pleasant updates like a recent tie up with Microsoft to craft data warehouses and virtual servers. However, while we see that it could be using these associations to fuel its business, experts believe that it’s actually a twisted milieu.

Wikibon Senior Analyst Stuart Miniman expressed his thoughts about all these developments saying, “The press likes to paint Cisco into a corner from a partnership standpoint, but reality is that HP and IBM still sell a ton of Cisco kit and while they may be losing some market share (especially at the edge where IBM/HP/Dell have alternatives). They still are well above 50% of core director sales and won’t be knocked off the number one Ethernet seat anytime soon.”

Previous reports say Cisco is aiming at acquiring VMware, but this may not just going to happen in this lifetime. This scenario makes the enterprise’s stance in the open cloud market all the more interesting.