If you were thinking that Cisco has been relatively quiet in the past few years, you would be right. But that’s changing dramatically, and soon. The former dot-com darling (it was at one time the most valuable company on the planet by market cap) is taking lessons learned from managing high-speed networks deep into the heart of every organisation: the data centre.

The noisy, air-conditioned brain of all companies over a certain size is getting a makeover and Cisco thinks it’s the company that can do the trick. Cisco SA country manager Steve Midgley says that the reason it will be successful is that the company has spent the last few years looking at the data centre with a fresh set of eyes.