The professional division of Thomson Reuters, six months into a massive data center virtualization project using Cisco Systems Inc. gear, has already seen a payback on costs.

As Cisco makes an aggressive play for data center market share with its California blade server, industry watchers speculate whether the vendor might also consider acquiring one of the big four management software makers to strike a potentially bigger blow to competitors HP and IBM.

Contrary to previous reports, Cisco's data center vision does not seem to be a largely solo effort.