Application Developers: Completing the Intercloud Ecosystem Puzzle

During the past year, the pieces of our Intercloud strategy have been falling into place. We’ve built out the technology, created services and orchestrated a robust partner ecosystem.

The reality is that Cisco is placing a big bet on our partners. We believe that a partner-centric strategy will prove to be the winning cloud model. We believe that by working with our partners we can move more quickly, deliver more innovation, and provide global scale and local presence.

Today we’re announcing that 35 independent software vendors (ISVs) will join the Intercloud partner ecosystem. The addition of these application developers not only adds another piece to the Intercloud Ecosystem puzzle, it actually completes the picture.

Symbiotic Relationship

For a partner ecosystem to operate effectively there needs to be a symbiotic relationship between its members. We’ve deliberately built an ecosystem with partners that will work effectively together.

• Intercloud Providers: Our Intercloud Providers are providing global scale, with local presence. In just over a year, 65 partners have signed up to embed Intercloud enabling technologies into their data centers, allowing them to tie into the Intercloud. Our ecosystem now has access to more than 350 data centers spanning 50 countries.
• Channel Partners: Rather than cutting out the channel like many major cloud vendors, we’re helping them evolve their business to be successful in the era of hybrid IT. Hundreds of our channel partners have become Cloud Builders, helping our customers build private clouds that provide a smooth onramp to the Intercloud. We’re also helping the rest of our channel community evolve to sell our Intercloud services and build up professional services practices around hybrid IT environments.
• Application Developers: ISVs are known for innovation and it will be great to have them developing modern, next-generation applications that will help us all, collectively, capture the Internet of Everything (IoE) opportunity. After all, the last mile in IoE will be made up of partners innovating. Plain and simple.

Already, we’re witnessing the fruits of this ecosystem approach. The #1 reason ISVs want to partner with Cisco? The partner ecosystem! As ISVs accelerate and drive cloud innovation, they want access to the Cisco partner channel. Eighty percent of our business flows through our channel partners. They’re a huge competitive advantage for Cisco and an extension for the ISVs that are partnering with us.

Partner Evolution

One of the things that Cisco has always done better than any competitor in the industry is evolve as a company with our partners. We did that to capture leadership in the voice industry, something many said we couldn’t accomplish. We’ve done it in the data center industry, quickly moving into a leadership position and driving the only real growth in the server market today. And, now, we are moving toward a hybrid IT future.

Innovation Ecosystem

The great news is that we’re seeing innovation across the Intercloud partner ecosystem. In addition to announcing the first wave of Intercloud Application Developers, six Intercloud Providers are announcing innovative new services based on Intercloud Fabric and one of our top Cloud Builders, Presidio, is embedding Intercloud Fabric into its private cloud managed service.

As we incorporate application developers to our partner ecosystem, I’m confident that they will fit right in, as a natural extension to our community of Intercloud builders, providers and resellers. This is truly a case of the whole being better than the sum of the parts and, together, we’ll continue to win in Intercloud.