Microsoft, Cisco Team Up For Branch Offices

The branch office is a hotbed for services opportunities. With this in mind, Microsoft and Cisco Systems on Tuesday unveiled plans to weave Windows Server 2008 services into Cisco's Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) appliance.

Cisco will add a virtualization component to the WAAS appliance line, which optimizes performance of TCP-based applications in WAN environments, to enable companies to host Windows Server 2008 services in their existing branch office infrastructure. Cisco will also pre-install Windows Server 2008 on the virtualized WAAS appliances it plans to launch later this year.

Bala Kasiviswanathan, director of branch and storage solutions at Microsoft, says the Cisco WAAS appliance will initially incorporate a basic set of Windows Server 2008 services, including DNS, DHCP, read-only domain controller, and print services.

"This is the kind of combination that accelerates access to centralized hosted application services without increasing the hardware footprint of the server," said Kasiviswanathan.

Cisco and Microsoft have been working on protocol consistency and interoperability on WAN optimization, and this integrated solution lowers cost complexity in the branch office, according to Baruch Deutsch, director of product marketing at Cisco, San Jose, Calif.

"This is a first moving step forward, not only to optimize Microsoft application services across the WAN, but also to host Microsoft services on Cisco WAN optimization appliance," Deutsch said. "This is the starting set of services that branch offices ask for most often."

Tom Gibson, a strategic business unit executive at ACS Commercial Solutions Group, Oswego, Ill., has been working with the WAAS appliance since the time it functioned primarily as a print and file server.

"Branch offices are a huge market for us, and we see the collaboration between Cisco and Microsoft as one that'll help us offer more flexible solutions to our clients," said Gibson.

Adds Gibson: "The WAAS product line is really application driven, and I think the Microsoft and Cisco partnership is good for flexibility and compatibility, mainly because you don't have to worry about whether the software will run on the hardware."

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