Clouds, Things and Developers: The Next Wave of Intercloud Innovation

It’s been just over 15 months since Cisco set out to build the Intercloud, a globally connected network of clouds. This massive effort brings together partners from across the Cisco Partner Ecosystem to create the only true partner-led cloud effort in the industry. A strategy we believe will ultimately prove to be the winning cloud model.

Over the past number of months, the Intercloud Partner ecosystem has been steadily and strategically building momentum, and today we are proud to count an increasing number of Intercloud Providers as part of the ecosystem – 65 partners, 350 data centers, spanning 50 countries.

This past year, Cisco has also partnered with some the world’s leading service providers like Telstra and DT on our public cloud footprint, the Cisco Intercloud Service. The Intercloud Alliance partners deliver the foundation for how we will be delivering Cisco Cloud solutions like Cisco Spark and Energywise.

We’re delivering all of our Intercloud services with our channel partners—Cisco’s extended sales force that drives 80% of our corporate revenue— extending Cisco’s and our Intercloud Providers’ reach into the global enterprise. We’re working with our channel partners to build Intercloud-ready private clouds for our enterprise customers and resell cloud services from Cisco and our partners. .

There is no other company on the planet that can take on the challenge of orchestrating such a robust partner ecosystem—bringing together the worlds largest providers, partners, and technologists to deliver on this vision of a globally connected, partner-led federation of enterprise cloud services

Today at Cisco Live! in San Diego, we are announcing the extension of our ecosystem, a move that signifies the next stage of the Intercloud. Our first wave 35 of ISVs and Developers will join us in bringing our vision of the Intercloud to life.

This is a big initiative for Cisco, and just like we have seen tremendous momentum bringing cloud providers and channel partners into the Intercloud, we are excited at the momentum and direction that our ecosystem is taking as we expand into these new communities. These partners are aligned behind our cloud vision and integrating their services not only to run “on” the Intercloud, but across our Intercloud suite—integrating with some of our key capabilities in networking services, Application Centric Infrastructure, and Cisco Intercloud Fabric – and deliver them across the public and private cloud models.

In this first wave of many, we’re focusing on three key priority areas – Enterprise Developers, Big Data and Analytics and IOE services.

As we talked about the move to hyper-distributed architectures, the new Application Developer plays a critical role in the consumption of cloud services as the enterprise moves to digitize their business and processes. In this first wave, we are bringing all of the leading developer environments into the Intercloud ecosystem including enterprise developer tools like Apprenda and ActiveState and leveraging many of the key open source initiatives like Cloud Foundry, Open Shift, Kubernetes and Docker. These are the tools that we use to build our new cloud services like Cisco Spark and future enterprise cloud services. We are also launching number of efforts that are geared towards embracing and enabling our developer community, through DevNet, where we are introducing cool new developer tools AND support programs for the Application Developer. This isn’t just about delivering core platform services. All of the Cisco technology that make up Cisco Intercloud Services will be made available via API for developers to leverage and embed in their own services—from virtual networking services to our collaboration technologies.

Big Data and Analytics is a second critical priority for us with these application development partners. As businesses move further out to the edges of the system, automation becomes mandatory just to handle the exponential set of things and interactions happening across the network. For enterprises, the more automated you get, the more important big data and analytics become, helping them support and understand the massive amounts of data and services being consumed at the edge. Cisco has seen significant success with companies like MapR, HortonWorks and Cloudera in our data center practice over the past number of years, and today we are bringing these relationships to the Intercloud. But its not just about taking these platforms and making them available in the cloud, we will be working to make the cloud a natural extension of what we are already doing in the data center—one platform, one interface, one experience delivered across multiple availability zones. With this, Cisco is delivering a truly integrated hybrid big data practice that provides enterprises with the choice, control and consistency they need in their big data practice. At the same time, we are integrating our connected analytics platform to this service as well—providing a great onramp for what we see as critical technologies that need to be in place for the Internet of Everything (IoE).

This brings us to the third priority, building the services that enable the delivery of IoE for the enterprise. Combining the efforts around the application developer with the construct of big data and analytics sets the stage for how we bring IoE together with Intercloud. We will be exposing APIs for the application developer that enable network control, performance and security to be delivered all the way out to the edges of the ether—which is critical when you start connecting billions of things. We will be delivering all of our IoE services via the Intercloud, such as Energywise and the Services Exchange Platform, and enabling developers and enterprises to tap into these unique capabilities to build more value into their services. We’ll extend this into building practices with our partners, like our Smart Cities initiative, to help make IoE a reality for all of our customers

We believe that this is a differentiated strategy – one that will win as we push forward. DevNet, our developer playground and evangelist teams, will continue to grow and bring that developer mindset back into Cisco and help empower enterprise application developers all around the globe. All of our cloud and IOE services, both Cisco and Partner built, will be delivered, promoted and monetized through a global marketplace that enables all players to engage in the digital economy. This gives our developer and ISVs unprecedented reach and access to customers and routes to market. We will match this with our world-class enterprise sales and partner community to help make this vision and these solutions, a reality for our customers.

Our vision of building a globally connected network of clouds continues to build momentum. By adding the final piece of our Intercloud ecosystem, we’re unveiling the next phase of the Intercloud—how we will team with our partners to deliver innovative cloud services that help our customers embrace IoE.