Three years after announcing its UCS servers and VCE partnership with EMC, Cisco is the number two vendor of x86 bladeservers in the United States, number 3 in the world, said Cisco VP of UCS Marketing Jim McHugh in an interview in the Cube from EMC World 2013. A lot of that success is due to partnerships with VCE Vblock and EMC VSPEX, he told SiliconAngle Founder/CEO John Furrier and Wikibon.org Co-Founder/Chief Analyst David Vellante. Read an overview of SiliconAngle.tv’s coverage of the conference and link to all the video interviews here.

With both Vblock and VSPEX, architect for both the type of workload — SAP, Microsoft SQL, VDI, etc. — and the size of the system. All are targeted to provide the best performance for the application. While the focus today is on virtualization and software, the underlying physical infrastructure is very important for maximum performance and efficiency, he said.

VSPEX plays an important role in that success, said Josh Kahn, VP of Solutions Marketing at EMC. “There are a percentage of customers who are ready for a truly converged infrastructure, and a percentage who are not,” and VSPEX provides those customers with a faster path to ROI using parts of their existing infrastructure than they can achieve by traditional custom integration.

VSPEX also empowers channel partners to build those systems to meet their customers’ needs faster, providing better service and better cash flow. EMC, said McHugh, is a very channel-focused company. Cisco has matched EMC’s channel approach to partnering with it with VSPEX.

Today, said Kahn, many of the software companies — Microsoft, Oracle, SAP — are very large and have multiple areas where they can naturally cooperate with VCE. “We find the areas of cooperation and focus on those. That tends to be more successful than focusing on areas of competition.”