I wrote in the post  Cisco decleares war to HP: is just to gain the blade market?   that Cisco declared war to Hp to gain the leadership of the Cloud Infrastructure tornado market. So, the impact for the channel should be evaluated in the long term view.  In this optic it should be analyzed the Cisco/EMC/Acadia partnership and the introduction of the relative certification for the channel. This long term analysis is not yet in my current possibilities.

If we restrict the analysis to a short term prospect, specifically to the blades market battle, it is possible to identify some key trends.

The alternatives for the channel.
As to the mature blades market, the channel has already made his choice. The possible impact of the current battle for Blades between Cisco and Hp will impact the channel depending of its business relationship with the big three vendors.
Table 1 summaries the possible positions that a reseller and a distributor have made toward IBM,HP and Cisco.  The impact of the current battle could be minimum (green color) to very important (red color).
I don’t have any kind of quantification of the number of the different partners for each possible combination.  From my experience, it is very difficult for a reseller and for a distributor to find a balanced position between HP and IBM. Both vendors pushed a lot the channel to make a choice between them.

table 1 alternatives for the channel

The choice of Cisco.
What is Cisco’s choice toward the reseller channel?  I tried to use the Cisco’s Partner Locator to identify who are the certified Cisco UCS resellers. Unfortunately, this tool doesn’t identify anybody in the category “Unified Computing System”.
As an alternative, I looked at the Award Category “Data Center Partner of the Year” of the Cisco Partner Summit 2009.
With this award, Cisco is indicating to the world who are the best partners in the new game of the Unified Computing System.
In table 2 I reported the awards of Cisco together with the status of the resellers toward HP and IBM.

table 2 - Cisco Awards 2009

What about distributors?
Distributors represents only 15% of the Cisco’s turnover.
For the moment,  Cisco is thinking at the Distributor channel mainly to distribute the new rack servers (so called C-series) but Cisco must serious think about the role of the distribution channel for his blade market. En effect, the role that distribution plays for Hp and IBM in this segment is much more important.
Table 3 reports the current UCS distributors of Cisco. In reality the ‘golden status’ for distributors doesn’t exist but I used this category to indicate if the distributor has already a strong networking offer of Cisco.

table 3 - UCS Distributors

Conclusion.
The current battle for blades market between Cisco and HP will impact deep the resellers that have not build a balanced relationship with Hp and IBM. If they are mainly HP oriented and they have also invested heavily in Cisco’s offer they probably have quick  to make a strategic choice. If instead they have a balanced offer between HP and IBM, they have time (and also the support of Cisco, as to tab 2 and tab 3) to add also Cisco’s offer (and, why not, increase their competence in Cisco’s networking solutions).
If you are a networking specialist and you have not yet considered to enter in the blade market, this could be a good opportunity. From Table 2 it doesn’t look that until now Cisco encouraged a lot their partners in entering this new market but for sure Magirus was able to come back to the blades market after selling its complete IBM and HP structure to Avnet Europe only few years ago.
From the recent declaration of Cisco (Cisco Global Channel Partner Strategy) and from the Awards of 2009 reserved to IBM, it looks that a closest partnership between these two giants is still possible. This would open a very interesting opportunity for IBM resellers to attack their mortal enemy HP in the blade’s market with a new value proposition.
Does all this make sense to you?

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To Know more:
Clouds on the channel: transition to thunderstorm  or to blue sky?
Cisco, Tech Data Prepare Unified Computing Moves
Ingram Micro: Talking Loudest About Distribution & the Cloud