Cisco and EMC, together with VMware, have introduced the Virtual Computing Environment coalition, calling it an “unprecedented” collaboration of three information technology companies.

 

The companies said that the coalition has been created to accelerate customers’ ability to increase business agility through greater IT infrastructure flexibility. In addition, this partnership expects to lower IT, energy and real estate costs via data center virtualization and a transition to private cloud infrastructures.

 

“Cisco and EMC (News - Alert), together with VMware, are coming together in an unprecedented way to help our customers. They need to be able to shift more of their IT budgets to the development and rapid implementation of new technologies that help their organizations create differentiated business advantages,” said Joseph Tucci, chairman and CEO at EMC.

 

The companies worked together over the past year on a shared vision for the future of enterprise IT infrastructure – private cloud computing. The private cloud is a virtual IT infrastructure that is securely controlled and operated solely for one organization, and can be managed either by that organization or a third party. Moreover, it can exist on or off premises or in combination.

 

According to company officials, private cloud computing offers the controls and security of today’s data center with the agility required for business innovation at substantially lower costs.

 

The Virtual Computing Environment coalition offers organizations of all sizes an accelerated approach to data center transformation with dramatic efficiencies, promising “significant” reductions in both capital and operating expenses, company officials said.

 

The Virtual Computing Environment coalition has introduced Vblock Infrastructure Packages. With this introduction, the Virtual Computing Environment coalition expects to provide customers with a better approach to streamlining and optimizing IT strategies around private clouds.

 

Vblock Infrastructure Packages are fully integrated, tested, and ready-to-go/ready-to-grow infrastructure packages, and combine virtualization, networking, computing, storage, security, and management technologies from Cisco (News - Alert), EMC and VMware.

 

Company officials said that the coalition will scale customer adoption of Vblock systems by enabling a global community of systems integrators, service providers, channel partners, and independent software vendors.

 

This coalition is about more than technology and partnership, said John Chambers (News - Alert), CEO at Cisco, adding that it is about an entirely new and unique approach to the data center that improves utilization, power consumption and security of information, all in a way that lowers the total cost to the customer, not via a box, but with a network-based architectural approach for optimizing virtual resources.

 

This coalition announcement provides a “compelling” vision and set of roadmaps valuable to any company looking to harness cloud computing in a fundamentally more pragmatic and nondisruptive way, said Paul Maritz, president and CEO at VMware.

 

In addition to the introduction of Virtual Computing Environment coalition, Cisco and EMC also introduced Acadia, a joint venture focused on accelerating customer build-outs of private cloud infrastructures through an end-to-end enablement of service providers and large enterprise customers.