Cisco’s Plan for Delivering the Data Center (and More) as a Service The networking giant is joining HPE and Dell in the pursuit of cloudifying the experience of consuming data center tech. Cisco is following its peers like Dell Technologies and Hewlett Packard Enterprise into the brave new world of selling everything – even data center hardware – as a service. It’s made several acquisitions that are expected to help it stand out in this small crowd of old-guard enterprise IT giants, the most consequential of which in this context being its $1 billion takeover of the network monitoring company ThousandEyes last year.