Cisco Systems is to sell its infrastructure to companies who provide pay-as-you-go cloud computing, will provide its own software as a service. It sees virtualisation as the next major computing model and its own Unified Computing System as the first step toward a fully virtualised data center.

Chief Technology Officer Padmasree Warrior (right) in a recent Cisco Live user conference briefing in San Francisco, said the company's presence in both enterprise and service provider networks makes it the ideal partner for companies adopting cloud computing, because they want to gain cloud benefits such as scalability and disaster recovery without pushing out control of all their infrastructure.

Cisco is positioning itself in the cloud world, as all major vendors find their places there and  Warrior said its approach differs from Hewlett-Packard and IBM because those  are moving into the sale of cloud computing resources, where Cisco fails to see a big enough business opportunity.

Warrior identifies four layers in cloud computing: software as a service (SaaS), development platforms as a service, capacity as a service, and the underlying infrastructure for providing those services.

Cisco already provides software as a service, in the form of its WebEx collaboration and IronPort security products. Its WebEx Connect offering for third-party application development is a platform as a service. Cisco will leave the business of selling raw capacity to others, while supplying the infrastructure for those kinds of companies, Warrior said.

With Cisco-based cloud infrastructures available for hire, enterprises will be able to keep some of their own resources, while tapping into public clouds and moving data, applications and computing workloads between the two smoothly, according to Warrior.

Cisco's Unified Computing System, combined new blade server platforms, networking and storage elements, is a step toward that capability. It's a pre-integrated architecture extracting the burden of manual integration and it has already sold UCS to some customers.

Cisco is updating the WebEx interface to appeal to 'Main Street' users and  the 'early adopters' who have made up much of its user base, said Doug Dennerline, (right) seniorVP of Cisco's Collaboration Software Group.

Software moves
Software will be oriented less toward virtual meeting spaces and more toward individuals whom a user collaborates with, he said.

For example, users will be able to click on a contact's name in an instant-messaging buddy list and see a history of interaction between the user and that person, such as what meetings they have both attended. If any of those meetings were recorded, links to those recordings would also pop up.

Cisco acquisition of PostPath last year is being used to create a cloud-based e-mail system integrated with the presence technology it acquired from Jabber, Dennerline said. Bringing smartphone users into WebEx is continues, with more than 150,000 downloads so far of the WebEx application for the iPhone. Cisco is also talking with Research In Motion, Nokia and Samsung about smartphone clients, he added.

Cloud computing is critical for collaboration because the next wave of productivity gains will come from inter-company collaboration, Warrior said.

There is a trend toward richer collaboration between companies, where so far most tools for interaction have been within organizations, said IDC analyst Abner Germanow, who attended the briefing.

Cisco has an edge over  Microsoft and IBM, which have dominated intra-company collaboration, he said. The faster that enterprises move in this direction, the better for Cisco, Germanow said, because its rivals are trying to catch up. However, the trend is likely to take two to five years to play out, he said.

And the slowly emergent Grid has its own collaborative role to play too. Grid versus Cloud, or Grid and Cloud merge? The niches here seem unstaked as yet.