Cisco and EMC combine to form Acadia, take on HP and IBM

(By Philip Carnelley, Nov 4 2009, 11.00) Cisco and EMC (which includes VMware) have launched a joint venture called Acadia to offer bundles of equipment and services to corporate data centres. Bundling networking, virtualisation and storage – together with the expertise to put it all together – makes perfect sense, and could create serious competition for IBM and HP. Cisco has long tried to broaden its reach in the computing space and the addition of the EMC/VMware offerings could provide the key. Sales of the technology bundles - productised as "Vblocks" - are expected to come via partners, including Accenture, CSC and TCS. The companies are positioning this venture as providing “private clouds” – though in our opinion, a private cloud is just a modern data centre using the latest virtualisation technologies. Meantime, the FT reports that HP is planning to launch, later today, a very similar vision to that of Acadia, using its own products. The battle will be fierce.