Cisco’s CDN is for its “Comm-puters”
We pointed to tips StreamingMedia’s Dan Rayburn received yesterday regarding the prospect of Cisco creating their own CDN. It looks like GigaOm’s Stacey Higginbotham picked up those tips and put it in context for us this morning in his reporting on the acquisition by Cisco of Tidal Software:
Cisco this morning said it plans to acquire Tidal Software for $105 million in cash as part of its expansion into the data center. Tidal, which raised venture money from investors including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Panorama Capital, and VantagePoint Venture Partners, makes software that schedules jobs and tracks the performance of applications across a network. Cisco can use such software to help IT departments track performance over highly virtualized environments, from the data center to the desktop.
To get the full context of what Stacey’s talking about here, you need to go back in the archives to get a handle on the scope of what Cisco proposes.
Last month, Om wrote extensively on the “unified computing” plans of Cisco. In short:
This rapid growth of digital information has resulted in the formation of megacomputers — Google, Salesforce, Facebook, Yahoo, Amazon and Microsoft — which are essentially data centers connected to each other via massive fiber networks […] A similar trend has started to emerge inside corporations. […] The current global economic crisis has taken away the luxury of operational inefficiencies, regardless of the size of the company. […] Many will have no option but to turn to the web and web-based software to unite its far-flung operations because they would need to be operationally efficient.
It’s an interesting strategy, and one that makes more sense (in retrospect) than Cisco going in direct competition with some of their best clients in creating a public-facing CDN.
This product, instead, seems to be a truly enterprise-centric answer to other clouds like EC2. It will enter into competition with other partners like Sun and IBM, but with every major entity building their very own clouds, Cisco would be a fool not to pursue their own ends as well.
For more information regarding the acquisition details, see Cisco’s announcement.
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