At this weeks conference in San Francisco, the companies said they will combine products intended to deliver a software defined datacenter. The expanded partnership will include an investment in dedicated engineering teams collaborating on VMwares cloud infrastructure and management software, and Ciscos data center networking and fabric computing platforms.

The companies say their investment in these joint dedicated engineering teams will represent a new level of collaboration in their long partnership, . The collaboration is intended to tightly couple physical and virtual infrastructure for these software defined datacenters.

Cisco and VMware, and VMware parent EMC, were believed to be heading in opposite directions following , and . Cisco, EMC and VMware are allied in the , a 2009 joint venture company selling a combined system of Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) servers, EMC storage and VMware virtualization.

Nicira has made no bones about looking to disrupt the Cisco status quo in networking, and . But this weeks expanded collaboration would appear to indicate that the companies plan to forge ahead on their alliance despite the competitive overtones.