IBM and Cisco Expand their Global Strategic Partnership with a Hybrid Cloud Announcement

Back in 2014, Cisco and IBM made the strategic decision to build an even stronger partnership focused on aligned offerings that today include data center, cloud, security, IOT and services. Our objective has always been to help our mutual customers leverage the power of two clear market leaders with the vision of enabling businesses to meet tomorrow’s challenges, today.

I’m pleased to share the latest extension to this partnership, as teams from Cisco and IBM cloud are jointly developing a reference architecture that implements IBM’s hybrid cloud offering—IBM Cloud Private—on Cisco’s hyperconverged infrastructure—Cisco HyperFlex and HyperFlex Edge. This hybrid cloud reference architecture will provide our mutual customers a consistent and secure production grade environment for distributed applications. Speaking of applications, Cisco and IBM are also working together to enable the new IBM Cloud Pak for Applications to support Cisco’s HyperFlex hyperconverged infrastructure. IBM Cloud Paks deliver enterprise-ready containerized software solutions that give customers an open, faster, more secure way to move their core business applications to any cloud.

Cisco and IBM Cloud, along with IBM Services, are also working on a broader hybrid cloud architecture that further leverages each company’s market leadership:

Cisco’s enterprise-class data center, networking, and analytics

IBM’s hybrid cloud solutions and IBM’s extensive catalog of enterprise software and open source software, VMware services, and virtual and bare metal servers.

If you want to learn more details, please check out Kaustubh Das’ blog.

And in case you missed it, at the recent Cisco Live in San Diego, consider watching the interview of Evaristus Mainsah (GM of IBM Cloud Private Ecosystem) and Eric Herzog (VP of IBM Worldwide Storage Channels) by TheCube while at Cisco Live San Diego. During the interview, Evaristus and Eric discuss not only how IBM storage solutions can be applied to help protect and leverage a company’s most valuable asset – its data – but also the extension of the Cisco and IBM partnership to run IBM Cloud Private on Cisco’s hyperconverged infrastructure. They also discuss how Cisco Virtual ACI (virtual POD) will be running in the IBM cloud bare metal offering for Cisco’s customers with virtualized environments that want to span into bare-metal clouds.

Year after year, the Cisco and IBM partnership continues to bring solutions to market to help our mutual customers run their businesses better. Keep watching as we continue to broaden our mutual story.