With Cisco’s announcement that the company is getting into the server business (news here), it is easily seen that all infrastructure businesses are collapsing into vertically integrated entities. This, in my opinion, is especially true/possible in the cloud. Why not offer all the primitives: compute, networking, storage? Why not offer cloud management software? Why offer all the web services need by developers and customers? Everything and all collapses into a dense, dark star.

Cisco just became a non-virtual, fully integrated systems company…just as everyone is moving on to be completely virtual.