Cisco Intertwines itself with Cloud, to Build Global Intercloud Ecosystem

As the enterprise community increasingly embrace private, public, and hybrid clouds to cost-effectively and quickly deliver business applications and services, US based networking major, Cisco has announced plans to build a global Intercloud – a network of clouds – together with a set of partners. 

The Cisco global Intercloud is being architected for the Internet of Everything, with a distributed network and security architecture designed for high-value application workloads, real-time analytics, “near infinite” scalability and full compliance with local data sovereignty laws. The first-of-its-kind open Intercloud, which will feature APIs for rapid application development, will deliver a new enterprise-class portfolio of cloud IT services for businesses, service providers and resellers.

Cisco expects to invest over $1 billion to build its expanded cloud business over the next two years.  Its partner-centric business model, which enables partner capabilities and investments, is expected to generate a rapid acceleration of additional investment to drive the global scale and breadth of services that Cisco plans to deliver to its customers.

The company plans to deliver Cisco Cloud Services with and through Cisco partners.  The following organizations, which are either planning to deliver Cisco Cloud Services or have endorsed Cisco’s global Intercloud initiative, represent a sampling of the kinds of global partners Cisco expects to work with to build its cloud business: leading Australian service provider Telstra; Canadian business communications provider Allstream; European cloud company Canopy, an Atos company; cloud services aggregator, provider and wholesale technology distributor Ingram Micro Inc.; global IT and managed services provider Logicalis Group; global provider of enterprise software platforms for business intelligence, mobile intelligence, and network applications MicroStrategy, Inc.; enterprise data center IT solutions provider OnX Managed Services; information availability services provider SunGard Availability Services; and leading global IT, consulting and outsourcing company Wipro Ltd.

“Customers, providers and channel partners alike are turning to Cisco to create open and highly secure hybrid cloud environments, and they want to rapidly deploy valuable enterprise-class cloud experiences for key customers – all while mitigating the risk of capital investment,” said Robert Lloyd, president of development and sales, Cisco. “The timing is right for Cisco and its partners to invest in a groundbreaking, application-centric global Intercloud to provide broader reach and faster time to market. Together, we have the capability to enable a seamless world of many clouds in which our customers have the choice to enable the right, highly secure cloud for the right workload, while creating strategic advantages for rapid innovation, and ultimately, business growth.”

Accelerating the Internet of Everything

Hosted across a global network of Cisco and partner data centers, the Cisco global Intercloud will offer an expanded suite of value-added application- and network-centric cloud services to accelerate the Internet of Everything.

The networked connection of people, data, processes and things, dubbed the Internet of Everything, is expected to be a $19 trillion economic opportunity in the coming decade.  The Internet of Everything movement, which is creating an entirely new set of requirements for globally distributed and highly secure clouds, has empowered Cisco and its partners to initiate the development of a massively scalable, flexible and highly secure Intercloud to deliver the mobile, collaborative and rich video cloud services that enable today’s new connected experiences.

The Cisco OpenStack-enabled Intercloud is designed to allow organizations and users to combine and move workloads – including data and applications – across different public or private clouds as needed, easily and securely, while maintaining associated network and security policies. It will also utilize Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) to optimize application performance and to make rolling out new services much faster. Cisco will improve application security, compliance, auditing and mobility by using ACI’s centralized, programmable security policy to enable fine-grained control and isolation at scale; suitable for private and public cloud environments.

Go-to-Market Strategy

Cisco is expanding the Cisco Powered program to include Cisco Cloud Services. Cisco will sell these new services through channel partners and directly to end customers. Partners who develop Cisco Powered services can offer more cloud offerings faster, with lower up front development costs, and operate at cloud speed and scale.

“As our enterprise customers continue to transition to the cloud, they are demanding hybrid cloud capabilities to meet the needs of differentiated workloads. Cisco Cloud Services offered via Canopy will give them a reliable, highly secure and flexible cloud platform option,” said Jacques Pommeraud, CEO, Canopy the Atos cloud. “As the largest European cloud provider, we are keen to further our portfolio, in particular in SaaS and data analytics building on Cisco’s vision on the Internet of Everything which will be supported by Cisco Cloud Services”

“Demand for reliable, highly secure and flexible cloud services that are easily managed from a single platform and can quickly scale is growing within the IT channel,” says Nimesh Dave, Executive Vice President of Global Business Process and Cloud Computing, Ingram Micro. “As channel partners’ service models continue to evolve, they are seeking out vendors offering turnkey cloud services that are easily integrated and enable them to meet customers’ business needs. Cisco Cloud Services are a great example of what channel partners are looking for from a vendor partner in this new era of anywhere, anytime computing.”

“As our customers continue to transition to the cloud they are demanding reliable, highly secure, open and flexible cloud platforms, layered with services and applications on top that transform their access to and use of a growing range of business transformation applications,” said Chris Gabriel, CTO Logicalis Group. “They then want cloud to provide scale and consistency of service wherever their organisation might be, anywhere in the world.  In launching their own Cloud Services, Cisco has made a significant undertaking to our customers to make cloud reliable, highly secure, flexible and scalable, and this is truly credible because these services are backed by one of the world’s strongest technology brands and IT service innovators.”

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