What’s the Deal With the Intercloud?

In late 2014, Cisco announced the Intercloud, a construct providing ubiquitous access to applications across network and cloud services endpoints. So what’s the fuss and what’s in it for Cisco partners and customers?

Back to the Beginning

Looking back, networking in its infancy provided a way to connect computers to computers allowing applications to communicate through data exchange. Networking soon evolved to support islands of connected computers, allowing for a greater scale of application communications via increased data flow and centralized data storage. Then the biggest industry-changing event occurred when these islands of compute connectivity were enabled to communicate with other islands of compute and interwork across what is known today as the Internet.

Well folks I’m here to tell you the good news, Cisco is once again changing the game and pioneering the next evolution of the Internet, called the Intercloud.

Let me explain…

What Is the Intercloud

With the introduction of Cloud Computing, we once again find ourselves in a position of a world of isolated islands of compute and storage. Compounding this we see Clouds, which carry a persona or application preference such as Clouds suited for web scale application or clouds suited for fault in tolerant applications, or clouds best suited for a particular ISV license model. So sometimes the best strategy is to simply do what you have always done – continue to lead in connecting the world of isolated applications and provide ubiquitous access to data processing and storage endpoints. This is the Intercloud.

So just like the Internet where Cisco provided a basis for the data packet to flow through networks with technology and protocols to support optimization of the best path or queuing prioritization; Cisco will do it all over again. The Intercloud will ensure that bandwidth and the packet is not the only consideration for end-to-end connectivity; but new metrics relating to cloud computing end points are considered and the new packet to route is now the application outcome itself.

Let’s Talk Opportunity

This opens up a range of new opportunities for Cisco partners in terms of driving value added differentiation through the Intercloud platform programmability and interoperability; and provides a compelling proposition to Cisco customers as they have a way to navigate multiple Clouds to consume services over a Cloud optimized network.

And Cisco is best placed to execute on this vision, why? Well if you think about it Cisco is merely doing what they have always done. The approach is similar, and Cisco has the asset at hand in terms of a rich portfolio of network, compute, storage and applications to ensure success. You can expect to see Cloud application working better over Cisco networks and they ensure Cloud end point to end point state consistency, performance and availability just like Cisco technology has for many years with say voice payload of networks.

In Summary

So it’s an exciting time and place to be in as Cisco evolves the network and likewise introduces our own portfolio of Cloud offerings covering IaaS, SaaS and PaaS – Cisco Intercloud Services.

Be on the look out for my next blog topic where I’ll dive a little deeper into Cisco Intercloud Services and Why the Network Matters.

In the meantime, I’d love to continue the conversation. Feel free to connect with me on Twitter or Linkedin

Until next time, Kon.