Cisco has sent its Intercloud initiative into hyper speed by adding more than 30 new partners and 250 additional data centers in 50 countries. The move expands the company’s giant network of interconnected clouds and promotes standardization of cloud applications as well as secure hybrid clouds.
Massive carriers and collocation providers BT, Deutsche Telekom, Equinix and NTT DATA are all participating in Intercloud, expanding Cisco’s vision of a globally distributed cloud platform geared toward the Internet of Everything. Other noteworthy new partners include Logicalis, Peak 10 and Virtustream, while Dimension Data, Forsythe Technology, Presidio and World Wide Technology have all committed to build Intercloud-ready private clouds through a new channel program. Cisco also recruited Comstor, Ingram Micro and Tech Data to become cloud aggregators, enabling and accelerating channel partners’ resources for reselling cloud services.
In tandem with the massive expansion, Cisco also announced its own hybrid cloud service and began shipping its secure and hypervisor-agnostic Intercloud Fabric interconnect technology. Cloud providers, builders and carriers are all using the technology to drive hybrid cloud adoption and better deliver services and offerings.
"Just as Cisco played a leading role in connecting isolated islands of LANs to architect the modern Internet, Cisco's Intercloud Fabric and Application Centric Infrastructure innovations uniquely position us to connect disparate cloud services to unlock the full potential of cloud, and with it a new era in IT," said Rob Lloyd, Cisco's president of development and sales.
As if the massive Intercloud expansion wasn’t enough, Cisco Capital, a wholly owned Cisco subsidiary, has committed $1 billion to provide financial solutions to customers and partners for accelerating and adopting Cisco cloud technologies. Financing will be focused on promoting the company’s Application Centric Infrastructure as well as facilitating technology migrations.
"What Cisco and Equinix are doing together is all about visibility and control,” said Ihab Tarazi, CTO, Equinix. “By connecting Cisco Intercloud and Cloud Exchange, we are adding policy, performance, security and visibility all the way to the application level, removing performance concerns sometimes associated with hybrid cloud services. Elasticity is essential for enterprises, and by providing a private, high bandwidth, highly secure infrastructure, we're allowing enterprises to achieve their vision of a truly elastic cloud."
Edited by
Stefania Viscusi
