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Low blow to Cisco delivered direct from Dell

by Sylvie Barak on 11 December 2009, 09:13

Tags: Dell (NASDAQ:DELL)

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It's not personal, just business

If you thought the world of enterprise was as dull as dishwater, think again, as Dell's VP of enterprise storage and networking, Praveen Asthana, delivered a scathing attack on its partner, Cisco.

At a Dell event in San Francisco, Asthana launched into a biting tirade, claiming Cisco's Unified Computing System, which bundles networking, computing, storage, and virtualization into one big expensive bundle, "just doesn't work for a lot of customers."

Asthana blisteringly blurted that Cisco - and steel yourselves, because this is truly shocking - actually cares more about its own bottom line than the needs of its customers. Who ever heard of a company doing such a thing?

But Asthana, it would appear, has some prior experience to draw from in his assertions, stating "in the past, I worked for a company that did a lot of vertical systems. What we found is that the economies benefit the company more than customers." Aha, so it takes one to know one, eh?

There is however, no greater zealot than one recently converted to the greater enterprise good, and Asthana was perfectly happy to preach why Dell had got it right and Cisco had got it so wrong.

Cisco's cardinal sin, it would appear, is that its UCS engenders a "vendor lock-in," so once you go Cisco, there's almost no way to not keep using Cisco, leaving the business in a very pricey purgatory.

Asthana told press, "we have one customer who refers to UCS as Unbelievably Costly Systems." Meow!