VCE (company)
VCE (standing for "Virtual Computing Environment") is a subsidiary of EMC Corporation that manufactures converged infrastructure appliances for enterprise environments. Founded in 2009 under the name Acadia, it was originally a joint venture between EMC and Cisco Systems, with additional investments by Intel and EMC subsidiary VMware. EMC acquired a 90% controlling stake in VCE from Cisco in October 2014, giving it majority ownership.
The company manufactures converged datacenter units known as Vblock, which incorporate Cisco servers and networking hardware, EMC storage systems, and VMware for virtualization.
History
Cisco Systems, EMC Corporation and VMware (partially owned by EMC) unveiled a joint partnership in November 2009 to develop cloud computing platforms called Vblock Infrastructure Packages.
The partnership was originally called the VMware-Cisco-EMC alliance, though the name was later shortened to VCE, for the “Virtual Computing Environment coalition”.
At the same EMC World trade show, Cisco and EMC introduced a joint venture named Acadia. The goal of Acadia, originally set up as a separate legal entity, was to build Vblock Infrastructure Packages in a standardized and repeatable fashion for customer data centers.Michael Capellas, who also was a board member of Cisco, was named chairman of Acadia, and its first chief executive officer (CEO) in May 2010. Praveen Akkiraju is VCE's current CEO.
Sales initially encountered some confusion among customers (which often had different staffs for storage and networking, for example), and different fiscal quarter sales cycles.
By the end of 2010, Capellas told analysts the venture had 65 customers, with an average system costing about $2.5 million.