Cisco’s CloudVerse Centralises Cloud Strategy

This is right up the alleys of telcos, most of whom have extra space and bandwidth they were not using that they want to put to work on cloud services – the upside of which is huge. Several analytics firms have projected this market to be worth dozens of billions of dollars in the next few years.

CloudVerse elements

Under the CloudVerse banner, Cisco is incorporating unified management capabilities that include Cisco Intelligent Automation for the Cloud. This provides automated provisioning and management of resources for the delivery of IT services within, and between, data centres and the previously-mentioned Cisco Network Services Manager, which automatically creates, deploys and modifies physical and virtual networking resources on demand.

On the networking side, Tucker said that Cisco’s Cloud Intelligent Network provides a consistent and secure user experience wherever the user is located and across the multiple clouds involved in delivering a service. These are all available now.

There will be additional CloudVerse products and services to come in 2012, Tucker said. Sometime next year, Cisco will add a new feature called Cloud-to-Cloud Connect capabilities, which includes Cisco’s Network Positioning System on the ASR 1000 and 9000 Series Aggregation Services Routers (ASR). This will enable dynamic resource identification, allocation and optimisation between data centres and clouds, Tucker said.

Also in 2012, CloudVerse systems will enable “as a service” delivery of both Cisco and third-party cloud applications, Tucker said. New capabilities to be added to Cisco’s Hosted Collaboration Solution next year include the following:

• Private Cloud HCS: This enables enterprises to build their own collaboration cloud using Cisco’s validated and tested designs and full management capabilities.
• Mobile HCS: Mobile service providers will be able to offer collaboration software from the cloud and extend services from fixed devices to mobile phones. For example, providers can virtually connect thousands of mobile users at a company with single-number reach, or enable customers to transition a call from a desk phone to a mobile phone while the call is in progress.
• Customer Collaboration: Cisco is making contact centre capabilities more affordable and accessible by adding Cisco Customer Collaboration offerings to HCS.

Clearing the Message

When Tucker joined Cisco a year ago after running Sun Microsystems’ cloud division for several years, he realised that his new company had not articulated its cloud message quite clearly enough.

“One of the first things I’d like to face directly is that is seems to be that Cisco needs to be crisper in its message out to the world about what we’re doing in cloud computing,” Tucker said in a December 2010 interview with eWEEK, shortly after he joined Cisco.

And that message would be this: Cisco wants to be your cloud infrastructure provider, and it will use its long-time expertise in the network, its many partnerships and a newfound sense of purpose as a baseline to do it.

Cisco now seems to be deploying that clearer message.