As I mentioned in my last posting, Cisco held its annual Partner Summit reseller conference in San Diego last week. While the overall tone of the conference was positive, there was one issue that I felt was worth bringing up, as it could have some long-term impact on Cisco and its channel.

I was sitting in the audience prior to the keynote and, looking at the stage, I saw a big rack that said “VBLOCK” on the side. So, I thought to myself that a demo was coming (of which there was a very good one). I’ve been talking to channel partners about VBlock since its launch a couple of years ago and there appears to be two schools of thought. Some partners, and I would say the majority of them, like VBlock. They can go from nothing to a fully functioning cloud in the better part of two days. Other partners, though, look at VBlock as a big threat to their business.

Last week EMC launched its eagerly awaited VSPEX architecture. VSPEX is a turnkey reference architecture made up of best-of-breed partners to deliver an end-to-end cloud solution. The solution, while led by EMC, also involved collaboration from such partners as Brocade, Cisco, Intel, Microsoft and VMware. VSPEX is another option for customers who do not want to build their own from scratch nor want a converged solution like VCE. It’s a proven solution that’s been validated by EMC.

One of the main points that I think was missed by much of the press around this announcement is that it can bring a solution to the mid-market. For all the hype and media attention VCE has received, it’s really not that appealing to mid-market companies. It may work, but it certainly has a premium price tag attached to it. Since VSPEX has various different configurations (14 in total), there are a number of lower-cost options that use infrastructure like Brocades ICX switches. So while there are many expensive cloud offerings out there for large enterprises to buy directly, VSPEX is an affordable channel play. Channel partners can customize it for different customers and even put their own brand on it if they want.