Dell targets Cisco in the data center

It appears that Dell is the next vendor to take aim at networking juggernaut Cisco. Dell, which building up its networking team and solutions portfolio, has no qualms about poaching top talent from its major competitors.

The first real volley over the castle walls was the recent hiring of Paul Perez, a former Cisco executive instrumental in the the vendor's successful Unified Compute System. Perez left Cisco in early March. A couple of weeks later rumors began surfacing that he was heading to Dell to take on the title of CTO in its enterprise solutions group.

An article on CRN noted that Dell is building a "dream team" for the data center that includes top technical talent who know their way around servers and switches, as well as channel sales veterans. It's a good strategy for going toe-to-toe with Cisco, which has long been known for hiring some of the industry's best talent and constructing a strong channel-partner ecosystem.

The CRN article also noted Dell's significant growth in its data center business. In some respects, Dell is now the number two vendor. But from a networking perspective, Dell has a long way to go, as the business is still dominated by long-time incumbents like Cisco and Juniper Networks.

That's not to say the biggest networking vendors don't have their own struggles. It's smaller vendors that are guiding and driving the software-defined movement, although Cisco and Juniper have both made strategic acquisitions to boost their own SDN initiatives.

Reference: Chris Talbot (Fierce Enterprise)