Today’s news builds on plans announced in March by Cisco to build the world's largest global Intercloud together with its partners to address customer requirements for a globally distributed, highly secure cloud platform capable of meeting the robust demands of the Internet of Everything. Designed for high-value application workloads, with real-time analytics and "near infinite" scalability, Cisco’s open Intercloud allows local hosting and local provider options that enable data sovereignty. The hybrid cloud capabilities that differentiate the Cisco Cloud are built upon the Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) and Cisco Intercloud Fabric technologies.
•Dimension Data and Sungard Availability Services (Sungard AS) will join Telstra as Cisco Intercloud partners – cloud providers that will invest with Cisco to align their public cloud infrastructure to the Cisco Cloud architecture and deliver Cisco Cloud services to customers and resellers.
•VCE and NetApp announced they will collaborate closely with Cisco to build “Intercloud-ready” integrated infrastructure solutions.
•Johnson Controls announced that it will enable Cisco Cloud partners and customers to quickly add computing capacity via modular data center solutions.
•Accenture has licensed Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud software to expand the cloud management and orchestration capabilities of the Accenture Cloud Platform.
More than 3,700 Cisco employees are now driving the execution of Cisco’s cloud strategy, including top new talent and existing Cisco leaders such as Edison Peres, who has directed Cisco’s worldwide channel efforts for over 10 years and will lead the Cloud and Managed Services partner organisation, reporting to Nick Earle. Several new Cisco Cloud executives have deep experience in deploying global cloud services, including a former OpenStack team lead at AT&T, former OpenStack developers at AT&T, and the former chief cloud architect at Yahoo. Cisco has also recently made key additions to its cloud organization from top cloud providers, including Amazon, CenturyLink Technology Solutions, IBM, Microsoft and others.
Rob Lloyd, President, Development and Sales, Cisco said “Since we introduced Cisco Cloud in late March, we have seen tremendous interest from our valued partners and customers, most of whom are interested in cloud environments that are open, highly secure, extensible, and enable data sovereignty. Furthermore, they are looking to Cisco for a network-centric approach to faster IT and cloud innovation. We are very pleased at the momentum we’ve generated thus far and have put a world-class team in place to enable our partners and customers to grow their businesses in a world of many clouds.”
Brett Dawson, CEO of Dimension Data “Over our 23 year relationship with Cisco, we have had many successes in the marketplace together and cloud is no exception. Dimension Data is proud to be the first global Intercloud partner. We have been providing cloud services for many years and have developed a robust global cloud service – available across all continents. We are extremely excited to support Cisco and its partners in accelerating the market’s move to cloud services.”
Phil Brotherton, Vice President, Cloud Solutions Group, NetApp added “Cisco’s Intercloud vision aligns with NetApp’s approach to enable customers to manage and maintain governance of their data spanning private and public cloud environments, irrespective of data type or location. Our companies continue to invest to deliver on the vision of FlexPod, building a secure, dynamic infrastructure to accelerate IT transformation. Now we’re integrating Intercloud fabric into the FlexPod platform to deliver dramatic improvements in operational efficiency and simplicity. Cisco Intercloud will help customers build the enterprise network and data management organisations need for the future.”