Let’s look at the press release – and read between the lines a bit:
As businesses increasingly embrace private, public, and hybrid clouds to cost-effectively and quickly deliver business applications and services, Cisco today announced plans to build the world’s largest global Intercloud – a network of clouds – together with a set of partners. The Cisco global Intercloud is being architected for the Internet of Everything, with a distributed network and security architecture designed for high-value application workloads, real-time analytics, “near infinite” scalability and full compliance with local data sovereignty laws. The first-of-its-kind open Intercloud, which will feature APIs for rapid application development, will deliver a new enterprise-class portfolio of cloud IT services for businesses, service providers and resellers.
MyPOV – It’s easy to coin a new term ‘Intercloud’ – harder to explain it and then maintain it. Cisco explains it as the Intercloud being a network of clouds, fair enough, but what is it. The Latin ‘inter’ refers to between – so it’s the network between the clouds – powered in the cloud? It’s harder to make a new term stick – so we will see who else may pick up the new buzzword. Cisco deserves kudos for making this a pretty rich cloud announcement – as it includes security, real time analytics, is compliant with local data sovereignty laws (very interesting), supports RAD and is offered together with partners. The data sovereignty is an interesting feature to keep an eye on – and begs questions – who will create and maintain the legislative rules, who will enforce them and what does it mean for the applications running in the Intercloud?
Cisco expects to invest over $1 billion to build its expanded cloud business over the next two years. Its partner-centric business model, which enables partner capabilities and investments, is expected to generate a rapid acceleration of additional investment to drive the global scale and breadth of services that Cisco plans to deliver to its customers.
MyPOV – There we go – $1 billion – so stretched through 2 years and we will have to see how much partner investment it will trigger.
The company plans to deliver Cisco Cloud Services with and through Cisco partners. The following organizations, which are either planning to deliver Cisco Cloud Services or have endorsed Cisco’s global Intercloud initiative, represent a sampling of the kinds of global partners Cisco expects to work with to build its cloud business: leading Australian service provider Telstra; Canadian business communications provider Allstream; European cloud company Canopy, an Atos company; cloud services aggregator, provider and wholesale technology distributor Ingram Micro Inc.; global IT and managed services provider Logicalis Group; global provider of enterprise software platforms for business intelligence, mobile intelligence, and network applications MicroStrategy, Inc.; enterprise data center IT solutions provider OnX Managed Services; information availability services provider SunGard Availability Services; and leading global IT, consulting and outsourcing company Wipro Ltd.
MyPOV – It’s a first to launch a cloud service with so many partners. But it looks more of a collection of the weak than the strong. Orchestration will be a predictable challenge. Let’s measure what these partners will put up in investment in the coming quarters though, let’s give Cisco and them the benefit of the doubt. The biggest problem – none of the partners mentioned – with the exception of MicroStrategy may bring significant work load with them – and that’s what cloud get cost effective with. So where will the load come from?
[…]
The Cisco OpenStack-enabled Intercloud is designed to allow organizations and users to combine and move workloads – including data and applications – across different public or private clouds as needed, easily and securely, while maintaining associated network and security policies. It will also utilize Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) to optimize application performance and to make rolling out new services much faster. Cisco will improve application security, compliance, auditing and mobility by using ACI’s centralized, programmable security policy to enable fine-grained control and isolation at scale; suitable for private and public cloud environments.
MyPOV – No surprise – this will be another OpenStack powered cloud, with the promise to combine workloads that we need to see delivered first in the real world before we fully believe it. No surprise ACI is being used – the question is how much work will partners and customers have to do adopt ACI and how willing will they do that – given other public clouds may not ask them to do that step. And building an ACI compliant application / load may hinder its transport to other OpenStack clouds – though hopefully not the Intercloud operating partners.
[…]
Cisco Cloud Services expand on the Cisco industry-leading cloud portfolio, which already includes SaaS offerings, such as WebEx®, Meraki® and Cisco Cloud Web Security; differentiated cloud services, such as hosted collaboration and cloud DVR; and technologies and services to build public and private clouds, such as the Cisco Unified Computing System™ (Cisco UCS®), integrated infrastructure solutions such as VCE Vblock™ Systems and NetApp FlexPod, and Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI).
MyPOV – Cisco brings already some applications to the offering, the WebEx product probably being the most popular – but that will not be enough load – despite being the most popular load used by enterprises. Would be nice not to see the download of the WebEx applet every time a session runs with a server on a different version. And then Cisco throws in pretty much all products it can claim for the cloud, including the result of the VMware partnership around VCE Vblock and NetApp Flexpod.
Cisco is expanding the Cisco Powered™ program to include Cisco Cloud Services. Cisco will sell these new services through channel partners and directly to end customers. Partners who develop Cisco Powered services can offer more cloud offerings faster, with lower up front development costs, and operate at cloud speed and scale. […]
MyPOV – This is the most interesting and differentiating area with a number of unique / significant capabilities. A RedHat OpenShift based PaaS, SAP HANA to run UCS, WebEx, DaaS (Cisco, VMware and Citrix) are the most interesting one and a bunch of more technical Cisco services. Collaboration as a Service (CaaS) struck me as one of the more unusual terms – but Cisco likes to call things a little different than the rest of the industry.
Overall POV
Cisco certainly comes late to the game, albeit with a different angle, the Intercloud. Certainly a fair angle for the leading network provider, who fittingly also announced a whole new set of networking equipment. But all public clouds need management between their data centers and that is what Cisco is really after. It’s unclear where all the Cloud Services will run – e.g. will WebEx run in the Intercloud (operated by who) or (only) in connected partner cloud (or both). So lots of questions remain. Also existing cloud providers may go an order Cisco network gear with a little more consideration going forward.
On the bright side, Cisco deserves credit to come out today, catch the early lead in what shapes to be a key week for the cloud (Google on Tuesday, Amazon on Wednesday and Microsoft on Thursday) – so better late than never. And the services are rich and differentiating. But lots of questions on the hybrid and partner based approach to cloud remain.