Cisco Ramps Up Cloud Push With $1bn Investment

Cisco has announced a host of new partners in its bid to push forward mass investment and involvement in cloud platforms supporting the Internet of Everything (IoE).

The company announced today that it has signed up 30 further companies for its Intercloud project, which looks to help businesses process and manage data generated from billions of devices and applications around the world.

The new partners include 26 cloud providers, including major organisations such as BT and Deutsche Telekom, and expands the reach of the Intercloud by 250 additional data centres across 50 countries. Today’s news builds on Cisco’s announcement of Intercloud earlier this year, with existing partners including Telstra, NetApp, and Red Hat.

Cisco says that Intercloud will provide a globally distributed hybrid platform that offers customers “near infinite” scalability but with local hosting and data sovereignty.

Major investment

To support this growth, Cisco will be investing $1bn over the next two years to expand its cloud offerings as it looks to get as many of its partners as possible upgraded to the latest services.

“Since we announced our OpenStack-based cloud strategy six months ago, we’ve received tremendous industry-wide support. The strategy is gaining momentum in the open source community and providing partners with a powerful cloud platform with global reach, and Internet scale and efficiencies,” said Rob Lloyd, Cisco’s president of development and sales.

“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.”

To support new customers, Cisco also announced that it will start offering Cisco Hybrid Cloud bundles, packages of technology and services which will allow customers already using a private cloud to build a hybrid solution with Cisco’s IaaS offering. The bundles will also allow customers who are not yet using a private cloud to gain that capability via a complete hybrid cloud and multinational IaaS solution.

News of such a major investment may raise some eyebrows within Cisco, which last month announced it would be cutting eight percent of its workforce (around 6,000 workers) as it continues its transformation into an IT solution provider.

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