It's not very clear, but it sounds like a roll up of various *-as-a-Service offerings, each of which may have been #1 in their niche markets. Also the fabled OpenStack InterCloud seems to fall into this business unit.

There's a fairly long list of the products/services here: http://www.zdnet.com/ciscos-big-cloud-play-why-it-had-little...

Cloud is a marketing term more often than not.

Reminds me of EA's (computer games) latest Sim City. They stated that the player's city would be saved on the cloud, when in reality players logged onto various regional servers ie Europe1 Europe2 etc. The player's saved city were only available on the server they were created on. This was just really naive explicit horizontal scaling and not the seamlessly scaled client/server arch their marketing implied.

So yeah 'Cloud' mostly a marketing term.

They consider UCS a private cloud in the can, which was introduced at a good time when IBM's f-up of x86 was enough to scare away even risks adverse enterprise customers. So they've seen lots of traction.

They also consider webex and some UC stuff (Jabber, some voip, etc) "cloud".