Cisco CEO Chambers: 'I did not want to compete against IBM and HP'

But now that they are competing, they aim to be #1

In the data center, I did not want to compete against IBM and HP. I tried to partner with both of them. I would have preferred that. But we knew going in - and the decision was made five years ago - once we started down the path with virtualization, that if they would partner we'd prefer to do that, and would have actually given them a large part of our technology. But if not, it was too important strategically to us, because it wasn't a question about moving into new markets. I'm not after servers. I'm after virtualization, where you don't know where your processors are, your information's stored, the application resides. You don't care.

Cisco CEO Chambers: 'I did not want to compete against IBM and HP'