The Next Phase of Co-Innovation – Cisco and Google Cloud

Today at Google Cloud NEXT, David Goeckeler unveiled the next phase of our journey with Google Cloud: the expansion of our multicloud and hybrid collaboration to include Google Cloud’s Anthos.

Multicloud and hybrid cloud are a reality for the majority of our customers as more enterprises expand into the cloud. What customers need is a seamless environment across on-premises and public clouds so they can deliver business results despite the complexity. That’s why our partnership with Google Cloud makes so much sense – Cisco’s networking, security, and data center portfolio, combined with Google’s platform, as well as the latest and greatest from the open source community, make a powerful set of capabilities available to our customers. The relationship between Cisco and Google Cloud spans multiple areas and the opportunities for co-innovation continues to expand. This is one of the reasons why I’m really excited to see this next evolution of our partnership with Google Cloud come to fruition.

Engineering teams from both companies first began working together on hybrid and multicloud solutions in 2017. Our shared vision started with developing Kubernetes-extensible solutions to integrate with Cisco networking, management, and security technologies as well as open source components. We’ve have been working together ever since, and what we’ve learned has informed our joint work with Google Cloud’s Anthos.

Google Cloud’s expertise in containerization and service mesh (Kubernetes and Istio, respectively) as well as their leadership in the developer community, combined with Cisco’s enterprise-class networking, compute, storage, as well as security products and services makes for a winning combination. The Cisco integrations for Anthos announced today will help customers build and manage multicloud and hybrid applications across their on-premises data centers and public clouds and let them focus on innovation and agility without compromising security or increasing complexity.

With these integrations, Cisco’s and Google Cloud’s goal is to deliver the best multicloud and hybrid cloud experience to customers by integrating Cisco technology with Anthos. A broad set of Cisco technologies including Cisco HyperFlex and HyperFlex Edge; Cisco ACI, Cisco Stealthwatch Cloud, Cisco SD-WAN, and Cisco Intersight will be integrated with Anthos. Cisco and Google Cloud have also jointly contributed to the open source project Kubeflow delivering new capabilities for AI/ML applications.The result is that Cisco and Google Cloud are delivering the most seamless and secure experience for Google Cloud’s Anthos.

From my perspective, we are operating in one of the most dynamic and fast-changing markets in IT, if not the world – cloud. But we don’t do it alone. We know that our partner ecosystem is central to our competitive advantage and that we truly are better together. With my roots as an engineer, I sort of “geek out” when we get to collaborate with outstanding teams of thinkers and visionaries to find inventive solutions to solve our customers’ greatest challenges. Our partnership with Google Cloud is a great example of how Cisco is working with partners to address real pain points for enterprise IT and pave the way for innovation. As more and more enterprises expand to the cloud, the ability to integrate in the way that Cisco and Google Cloud are as we execute on our shared vision will be more important than ever before. And we continue to evolve our portfolio to serve our joint customers in other areas such as our integrations between Google and Cisco Collaboration that improve workplace productivity.

Partners like Google Cloud are important to helping us deliver new innovation in today’s constantly changing multicloud world. Since we started our journey, we’ve worked together to give customers the freedom and security they need to develop and deliver applications in the new multicloud reality. I’m excited about this next phase. Together, we are helping customers innovate faster and there’s more to come.

Learn more:

Cisco and Google Cloud partnership page

Read the blog from Eyal Manor, VP, Engineering, Google Cloud

Read the announcement from Kevin Ichhpurani and Carolee Gearhart, Google Cloud