Cisco says the sky’s the limit for the billion dollar cloud services business it announced today. The networking equipment giant says it will build “a network of clouds” along with a set of partners, including Telstra and Ingram Micro. Cisco says it plans to build the “world’s largest global Intercloud” for the Internet of Everything. Targeting service providers, businesses, and resellers, the Cisco intercloud will feature APIs for rapid application development.
Partners will contribute technology and investment to the project, and Cisco itself plans to invest more than a billion dollars. “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,” said Robert Lloyd, president of development and sales, Cisco.
Platform-as-a-service and infrastructure-as-a-service will be cornerstones of Cisco Cloud Services. Offerings will also include WebEX, Cisco’s Meraki cloud management, voice and contact center as a service, and desktop virtualization solutions from Cisco, VMware and Citrix.
Cloud services are increasingly important to mobile operators as they work to virtualize more parts of their networks. The vendors that sell mobile infrastructure are all looking at software as a way to increase the value of their offerings. Cisco is a top vendor of routers and switches for mobile networks, and is also a player in optical networking gear, small cells, and Wi-Fi access points. The company clearly signaled its focus on the cloud when it bought Meraki for $1.2 billion and made the Meraki team its cloud networking group. Cisco is also very clearly targeting mobile operators as customers and partners.
“Our longstanding relationship with Cisco allows us to offer deeper and broader service capabilities to help our customers manage their critical applications, making the transition to the cloud simpler and more cost effective,” said Erez Yarkoni, Telstra’s executive director for dloud, global enterprise and services. “Our customers will now have access to cloud infrastructure from a global leader, allowing them to select the cloud service to meet their requirements and scale network and cloud resources to deliver service agility, security and performance. Applications are critical to delivering business value and we believe we can offer a differentiated solution for managing applications across clouds.”
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