Unlocking the Power of Enterprise Applications

Cisco is doing a lot to unlock the power of enterprise applications, not only through our own development activities but also with important technology partners.

I had the opportunity to sit down with SAP’s Dr. Franz Faerber in a fireside chat at this week’s SAP Sapphire NOW event, to talk about our shared vision around the role of containers in the enterprise. We talked about the future of containerization, Kubernetes, and hybrid cloud environments and how crucial containers are going to be.

Everybody loves containers with Kubernetes because they offer incredible potential for speed, consistency, and flexibility. But containers are not all roses for enterprises – with benefits come some big challenges. Nobody loves deploying, monitoring, and managing container lifecycles, especially across multiple public and private clouds. On top of that, there are a lot of choices when it comes to environments, which can also create a lot of complexity – there are simply too many tools and too little standardization.

In January of this year, we launched the Cisco Container Platform, powered by Kubernetes, which is a turnkey-solution for production grade container environments. The Cisco Container Platform automates the repetitive things and simplifies the complex ones so everyone can go back to enjoying the magic of containers. The Cisco Container Platform is a key element of Cisco’s overall container strategy and another way Cisco provides our customers with choices, alongside platforms like Red Hat OpenShift and Docker.

During our session, Franz and I talked about how SAP and Cisco have jointly built a proof of concept for SAP Data Hub running on the Cisco Container Platform and Cisco HyperFlex. One of our key reasons for this joint engineering effort is that even if customers have large data sets in public clouds like AWS, Azure, or Google, they will still require significant data sets on premises. The proof of concept that we demonstrated this week is really exciting because it shows how this joint innovation could help customers run their production-grade SAP Data Hub environments on premises and extend these environments to Kubernetes-based public clouds such as Google Cloud, for example. Running Cisco Container Platform on Cisco HyperFlex provides an even more integrated solution and the easiest way to deploy Kubernetes on premises.

Franz and I are excited about SAP Data Hub running on Cisco Container Platform with Cisco HyperFlex. We received some greet feedback at the SAP Sapphire NOW event about our efforts to look ahead and address big data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning in our ongoing joint innovation.

I can say we love partnering with SAP and think this is a really powerful evolution of our collaboration.