“You got your chocolate in my peanut butter!” “You got your peanut butter on my chocolate!” Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups iconic marketing from the ‘80s demonstrates what can happen when two great things come together. So what is the latest combination creating excitement? Cisco Collaboration and Cisco Virtualization solutions. With its 8.5 release of the suite of communications software, Cisco now fully supports virtualizing its voice applications across the entire product portfolio on its Unified Computing System (UCS) platform. Virtualizing applications is nothing new. The benefits in operating expenses and consolidation of resources is well documented on this website and others. However, when those applications are the ones providing communications services to your entire enterprise from one or two centralized locations, then you have a chocolate-in-peanut-butter event.

While clearly this development is going to reduce the investment in hardware to support intricate Cisco Collaboration deployments, it’s the flexibility in design and adaptability of operation that has me comparing it to my favorite flavor merger. The ease of migration and replacement of hardware when the server is just a file on storage makes the last 10 years of rebuilding servers from scratch seem like a bad dream. Disaster recovery plans for business continuance are greatly simplified and easily assured with virtualized communications systems. And as Cisco continues to certify VMware advanced functionality for moving live virtualized servers from one hardware host to another without interruption in service – either at the push of a button from human intervention or automatically in response to system logic for resource availability or component failure – then the mixture only gets sweeter.

So which combination is my favorite? It’s hard to say for sure, which is saying a lot for those who know me well… or know my dog Reese.