Cisco’s Bigger Bundle of Networking

Cisco introduced a comprehensive collection of computer networking hardware for cloud computing on Tuesday. The parts are not particularly new, but the packaging is — and that matters for both customer education and sales.

The framework, CloudVerse, unifies computing and network management; computer applications, including video and collaboration software; and movement of data between clouds. The benefits should include lower cost, faster deployment, and easier management, the company says.

“It’s a pool of computing resources,” said Lew Tucker, Cisco’s chief technical officer for cloud computing. “We’re still an infrastructure provider, but we’re coming out with more complete solutions.”

The underlying technologies include Cisco’s Unified Data Center, Cloud Applications and Cloud Intelligent Network products. Not long ago, these were considered both advanced and comprehensive. Now, they too need to work together as one product, for a world where tens of thousands of computers may work at once on a single task.

“By unifying the pool of resources, you can automate even more of the network,” Mr. Tucker said.

Cisco is coming out with a lot of corporate customers to endorse CloudVerse, including Fujitsu, Telstra and Silicon Valley Bank.

CloudVerse also reflects efforts by John Chambers, Cisco’s chief executive, to simplify and streamline what and how it sells to big corporations. What Cisco may increasingly leave behind with this move is VCE, the supposedly “best of breed” cloud hardware Cisco formed in conjunction with the data storage company EMC Corporation, with investments from the computer virtualization firm VMWare and Intel. EMC was founded in 2009, has been around about a year in its current form and has relatively little presence or come up in discussions with senior executives at any of the sponsoring companies. Mr. Tucker did not comment on what effect the new Cisco strategy would have on VCE.

Meanwhile, like other tech giants, Cisco has issued some nearly frightening, certainly mind-boggling statistics about how much data we will soon consume, thus requiring more clouds. Global cloud traffic, Cisco says, will grow more than 12 times by 2015, to 1.6 zettabytes. That is about four days of high-quality video for every person on the planet. If you are reading this, you will probably take more than your share.