"The battle for the next-gen data centers will be competitive, and we view it as a key driver for tech...over the next two to three years," states UBS analyst Nikos Theodosopoulos in a bulletin on next week's event. "The competition will likely impact networking, storage and hardware...as business models change and market shares shift. M&A is also likely. We will be interested to see how Cisco approaches M&A and partnerships with regard to its data center strategy."

While not exactly a solo effort, Cisco's Unified Computing partnerships appear to be a bit looser than the IBM/Juniper union, observers note. Microsoft, Intel and VMware, for example, partner with several Cisco competitors in data center applications, and one -- Microsoft -- competes with Cisco in unified communications and data center virtualization.

In addition to the five partners, and are expected to be present to demonstrate how their applications can be mobilized as virtual machines (VM) in a Cisco Unified Computing environment; and service provider will be introduced as a beta customer for Cisco Unified Computing products, sources say.

Also, Cisco may roll out an additional wave of partners in a month, which could include Dell, EMC (storage), NetApp and Emulex, sources say.

Cisco would not confirm the information. But the company is expected to discuss technology dislocation opportunities in current data center architectures, specifically how storage, networking and servers operate as separate platforms, states UBS' Theodosopoulos.