Chris Talbot| Thevarguy
An addition to Cisco Systems‘ (CSCO) Cisco ONE platform is intended to support hybrid clouds by enabling organizations to combine and move workloads across a variety of different public and private clouds as needed.
Cisco InterCloud, announced at the Cisco Live! event in Milan this week, is infrastructure software that builds a foundation as a hybrid cloud solution that the networking vendor claims will lower the total cost of cloud services ownership for IT organizations.
“Cisco introduced the concept of the ‘World of Many Clouds’ two years ago, and since then, we and our partners have been enabling an ever-expanding world of highly secure clouds, helping organizations shape their own unique cloud journeys,” said Rob Lloyd, Cisco’s president of Development and Sales, in a prepared statement. “Now, as brokers of IT services, organizations can add value by dynamically combining, integrating and tailoring the delivery of cloud services—whether public, private or hybrid—to best meet their business needs.”
Aimed at enterprises and cloud providers, InterCloud was designed so customers could create an interoperable and secure hybrid cloud environment across multiple public and private clouds, as well as between premise-based applications and clouds. Cisco noted the product creates interoperability between on-premise and cloud environments without sacrificing existing network and security policies.
Considering Cisco’s go-to-market strategy with cloud, there are bound to be channel opportunities. Cisco didn’t note specifically how the channel would play into InterCloud, but the vendor did mention new services that will be sold through the channel, including the new Cisco Cloud Consumption Services, which will enable partners to help customers get a handle on corporate cloud usage and spending.
Cisco also unveiled Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud 4.0, a cloud management offering for enterprises and cloud services providers that has been upgraded with enhanced services catalog features. It has also been integrated with Cisco UCS Director to provide the ability to provision virtual and physical infrastructure for cloud deployments on UCS, Nexus and third-party hardware.
