Cisco is adding some muscle and money to its Intercloud skeleton, signing over 30 new partners to its worldwide network of interconnected clouds. The new alliances add 250 data centers in 50 countries to Intercloud.
Cisco Capital,a wholly owned subsidiary of Cisco, has also earmarked $1 billion in financing to the effort, providing the money so Cisco customers and partners can more quickly adopt the Cisco technologies needed to transition to Cisco-powered clouds.
Deutsche Telekom, BT, NTT DATA, and Equinix are among the heavy hitters joining forces with Cisco to make possible two major industry moves: a new generation of standardized cloud applications and the proliferation of secure hybrid clouds.
By aligning with these companies, Cisco takes a quantum leap toward its plans to address customer demands for a globally distributed, highly secure cloud platform that can meet the needs of the Internet of Everything. Cisco’s open approach to the Intercloud is designed for high-value application workloads, with real-time analytics and “near infinite” scalability and promises local hosting and local provider options that enable data sovereignty.
Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst at ZK Research, told us to think about Cisco’s Intercloud like a mini-Internet of clouds. As such, he said, its success depends on how many partners it has.
“You can have the best plan but if you don’t have many partners it doesn’t add much value,” Kerravala said. “This is a good example of the network effect, where the value of the network is proportional to the square number of nodes on it. With more nodes the value grows exponentially. If you are a multinational looking to do some sort of hybrid cloud service, you are almost certain to find Cisco certified services in the companies you are in.”
Getting Down to Cloud Business
Indeed, Rob Lloyd, Cisco’s president of development and sales, said the company has received strong industry-wide support since announcing its OpenStack-based cloud strategy six months ago. In fact, he pointed to clear momentum in the open source community and providing partners with a cloud platform that offers global reach, Internet scale and efficiencies.
“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,” Lloyd said. Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) couples innovations in software, hardware, systems and ASICS with an application-aware network policy model built around open APIs that reduce application deployment from months to minutes. (continued…)
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