Confirmed: Cisco has killed its EMC-killer product and laid-off the team

Cisco on Friday officially pulled the plug on a computer storage product called Invicta, acquired when it bought a startup called Whiptail in 2013 for $450 million.

And we can imagine the folks at Cisco's partner-turned-arch-rival EMC, getting a chuckle out of the situtation.

The TL:DR version:

By shuttering Whiptail the day before new CEO Chuck Robbins officially takes ofice, Robbins has admited Cisco's attempt to compete head-on with one-time partner EMC didn't work. The question is, will he offer a bigger olive branch to repair that partnership?

Meaty details: Yes, Cisco is laying off the Whiptail staff

The official shuttering of Invicta confirmed an earlier report by Chris Mellor at The Register that Cisco had thrown in the towel and laid off nearly all of the Whiptail staff. We aren't sure how many people were affected. (We found over 50 people on LinkedIn who had worked at Whiptail, but many of them had already moved on.)

Cisco confirmed a layoff did take place. A spokesperson told us:

Cisco's acquistion of Whiptail was a slap in the face at EMC

The Whiptail technology had a lot of problems

The Invicta product had been plagued by issues almost from the get-go. In September, 2014, Cisco haulted shipments of Invicta because of "quality" issues, according to a CRN report.

Also in September, the CEO leading Whiptail when Cisco bought it, Daniel Crain, left Cisco.

By the spring of 2015, Whiptail's co-founder, James Candelaria, who had became director of engineering at Cisco, left the company to launch his own consulting company.

A month later, the guy running the UCS line and responsible for the Whiptail unit, Paul Perez, left to join Dell as CTO.

Fast forward to Friday, when Cisco formally killed the Invicta product, announcing to customers it would no longer sell it.

Cisco now says it will work with its storage partners to provide flash storage with its UCS computer servers. Such partners include EMC and NetApp.

This could be an olive branch from brand-new CEO Robbins to EMC. We'll see if Robbins follows it up with other moves designed to repair the relationship.

This is also the second business that Cisco shuttered the week before Robbins officially took over. Last week Cisco divested its huge televsion video control business, bought for $6.9 billion in 2005, selling it for $600 million.

Robbins clearly wants to quickly cut Cisco's problems and get the company focused on its next big opportunity, the Internet of Things. That's where billions of devices will join the internet.

Here's what Cisco told us about why it shut down Invicta (bolded words added for emphasis):

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