Cisco to build ‘Intercloud’

Cisco has announced plans to build the world’s largest global Intercloud – a network of clouds – which will be specifically architected for the Internet of Everything.

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 R10 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 in South Africa.

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 Kevin Hardy, Country Sales Director, Cisco South Africa. “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,” says Hardy.

Accelerating the Internet of Everything

Hosted across a global network of Cisco and partner data centres, 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 R190 trillion ($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 organisations 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 utilise Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) to optimise application performance and to make rolling out new services much faster. Cisco will improve application security, compliance, auditing and mobility by using ACI’s centralised, programmable security policy to enable fine-grained control and isolation at scale: suitable for private and public cloud environments.

Extending Cisco Cloud Leadership

Cisco Cloud Services expand on the Cisco industry-leading cloud portfolio, which already includes SaaS offerings, such as:

· WebEx, Meraki and Cisco Cloud Web Security

· Differentiated cloud services, such as hosted collaboration and cloud DVR

· Technologies and services to build public and private clouds, such as the Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS), integrated infrastructure solutions such as VCE Vblock Systems and NetApp FlexPod, and Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI).

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.

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