Cisco expects to commit more than $1 billion to expand its cloud business during the next two years, part of which will be spent building the world’s largest global network of clouds. The company, in tandem with numerous partners, is working to build the Intercloud distributed network and security architecture for application workloads, real-time analytics and “near infinite” scalability.
According to Cisco, the open Intercloud will be compliant with local data sovereignty laws and offer APIs for quick application development. The goal of the network will be to deliver an enterprise-class portfolio of cloud services geared toward service providers, resellers and businesses.
Targeted partners like managed service providers (MSPs), will be instrumental in building out the Intercloud as they will be able to rapidly roll out and scale services for quick ROI. A number of companies have already committed to the initiative, including Australian service provider Telstra, Canada’s Allstream, European cloud provider Canopy and Ingram Micro. Other partners include Logicalis, MicroStrategy, OnX Managed Services, SunGard Availability Services and Wipro.
"As our enterprise customers continue to transition to the cloud, they are demanding hybrid cloud capabilities to meet the needs of differentiated workloads,” said Jacques Pommeraud, CEO, Canopy the Atos cloud. “Cisco Cloud Services offered via Canopy will give them a reliable, highly secure and flexible cloud platform option."
Intercloud will be Cisco OpenStack-enabled, letting users combine and move workloads across multiple public and private clouds as needed. It will also feature the Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) for optimized application performance and quick rollout of services.
Cisco’s Cloud Services are extensive and include a number of SaaS offerings like WebEx, Meraki and Cisco Cloud Web Security. Intercloud will also offer hosted collaboration and cloud DVR services and tools for building public and private clouds like the Cisco Unified Computing System, VCE Vblock Systems and NetApp FlexPod.
Additional capabilities will include PaaS and IaaS; virtual desktop-as-a-service; partner-branded Cisco Hosted Collaboration Services; virtualized mobile internet; virtualized managed services; remote management services; compliance and configuration management services; IT service management services; energy management services; and collaboration-as-a-service (CaaS).
"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. "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."
"Our customers continue to look to the cloud for more information availability functions such as cloud enabled managed hosting services, extra compute capacity, disaster recovery, and more," added Keith Tilley, EVP, Sungard Availability Services. "Cisco Cloud Services give us the ability to quickly scale our cloud offerings to meet our customers' needs enabling us to continue to provide the value added services they need to grow their businesses."
Edited by
Stefania Viscusi