Cisco is the new container for ContainerX

The container market just got a new 900-pound gorilla: #Switchzilla has landed in the segment with its acquisition of eighteen-month-old #ContainerX. The acquisition target is a container management specialist whose first beta landed in November 2015, with general availability arriving in June this year. While #Cisco digests its target, ContainerX has switched off product downloads, webinars, and product support. Blogging the buyout, Cisco's Rob Salvagno says the attraction is a technology that gives it “enterprise-class container management” across various target platforms. “The ContainerX team will join Cisco’s Cloud Platform and Services Group led by vice president Kip Compton”, he writes. ContainerX's site says it can manage bare metal, virtual machine, Windows and Linux systems on public or private clouds. The Register would expect Cisco's UCS platforms to get added to the list in short order. Salvagno notes that the company wants to develop its own “comprehensive cloud-native stack” for container users. Switchzilla's new CEO Chuck Robbins has launched the company down the same track as much of the industry: in a world where hardware growth is difficult to sustain, he wants a pivot to software and services. That can hardly be more risky than business-as-usual: it's suffered flat or marginal revenue growth for years, and in its Q3 2016 turned in revenue of US$12 billion, down $100 million from the same quarter in 2015. Things were better in Q4 for the bean-counters, but not for staff in the “legacy” businesses: 5,500 had their summer holiday turned into a job-hunt.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/31/cisco_is_the_new_container_for_containerx/