In a move to beef up its Intercloud strategy, Cisco is acquiring a privately-held company called Metacloud. The firm deploys and operates private clouds for global organizations with an OpenStack-as-a-service model.
Metacloud’s model stands out in the industry because it both delivers and remotely operates production-ready private clouds in a customer’s data center. Cisco figures the platform will accelerate its strategy to build the world’s largest Intercloud. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
InterCloud is Cisco’s relatively new hybrid cloud solution that aims to lower the total cost of cloud services ownership for IT organizations and pave the way for interoperable and highly secure public, private and hybrid clouds.
Simplifying OpenStack Deployment
“Cloud computing has dramatically changed the IT landscape. To enable greater business agility and lower costs, organizations are shifting from an on-premise IT structure to hybrid IT — a mix of private cloud, public cloud, and on-premise applications,” said Hilton Romanski, Senior Vice President of Cisco Corporate Development. “The resulting silos present a challenge to IT administrators, as choice, visibility, data sovereignty and protection in this world of many clouds requires an open platform.”
Cisco is betting Metacloud’s technology will play a critical role in enabling its customers to experience what Romanski called a “seamless journey to a new world of many clouds, providing choice, flexibility, and data governance.” The goal is to help customers address demands for a globally distributed, secure cloud platform that can meet the demands of the Internet of Everything.
We caught up with Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst at ZK Research, to get his take the buy. He told us Metacloud is a strategic acquisition for Cisco.
“Metacloud certainly bolsters Cisco’s Intercloud strategy, especially for customers that want to use OpenStack but don’t have the technical skills to do it,” Kerravala said.
“What Metacloud offers is a private-cloud-as-a-service. There’s a tremendous amount of interest around OpenStack but I think the complexity of deployment is a barrier. Metacloud can simplify deployment. This should give OpenStack a bit of a kickstart.”
Blending Public-Private Benefits
Kerravala is on to something — and so is Cisco. OpenStack is gaining acceptance with CIOs because of its ability to handle virtually any workload on any hypervisor on any public or private cloud.
Managing OpenStack installations at scale is a critical component of Cisco’s Intercloud strategy. By acquiring Metacloud’s remotely managed OpenStack private cloud-as-a-service platform, Cisco can leverage OpenStack as an increasingly important part of driving forward its customers’ journeys to the cloud.
The way Cisco is looking at the acquisition, it will help enterprises match the “as-a-service” operational benefits the public cloud has to offer with the control and security that makes the private cloud so attractive.
After the acquisition, which should be complete in the first quarter of Cisco’s fiscal year 2015, Metacloud employees will join the firm’s Cloud Infrastructure and Managed Services organization led by senior vice president Faiyaz Shahpurwala.
Super Geek:
Posted: 2014-09-17 @ 7:45pm PT
Good plan, and good acquisition.
michael wind:
Posted: 2014-09-17 @ 7:41pm PT
Once information is on the Internet, it could become public….. it will become public.
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