self-built or merchant switching asics?

recently, john chambers, the CEO of cisco, has some comments on where cisco is heading to. "No fear of merchant silicon, John Chambers still considers ASICs an edge." It seems to me that Broadcom, Intel switching ASIC is fairly good enough for a large scale data center environment such as aws and azure. For enterprise network and internet, cisco still think customized ASIC can still bring competitive advantages to them. I do not quite clear about this. Broadcom also have ASICs for these markets. However, they are still not quite popular.

zygna and aws

It's well known that zygna is building its own data centers named zCloud. Here are some tech. details.

1. Its zCloud is built upon cloud computing software by Cloud.com (now part of Citrix), its analytics platform is primarily a Vertica database (now part of HP) and its application servers run the Couchbase NoSQL database.

2. Zynga still runs 20 percent of its gaming workload on Amazon Web Services.

3. One of Zynga’s own servers can handle three times the load of a comparable machine image on AWS.