Cisco Bets a Billion on the Cloud - NYTimes.com

Final paragraphs of a Cisco cloud reality check

"On the other, Cisco and the other big incumbents it hopes to bring into its Intercloud may be making a play for relevance in a world that has evolved beyond the systems they built. What a Cisco (or for that matter, an Oracle, SAP, Verizon and others) has to offer in this future is primarily a strong relationship with the past. That is no small matter to companies that have to manage decades of data and applications.

Whether this move is a rear-guard action or a forward-looking play, however, it’s clear that cloud computing has become a very big money game."

Cisco Bets a Billion on the Cloud - NYTimes.com