Partners: Simplify Open Hybrid Cloud for Your Customers

If you saw our October 25 announcement regarding our partnership with Google, then you know we’re working together to deliver a hybrid cloud solution to enable applications and services to be deployed, managed and secured across on-premises environments and Google Cloud Platform. For enterprise customers, this will make it easier for them to manage their existing public and private cloud investments, which remains a key priority. In fact, IDC’s research indicates that over 90% of enterprise-scale organizations plan to make use of multiple clouds in the next several years.

But how will this benefit you as a Cisco partner?

What’s In It for You

Here is how you can leverage the Cisco-Google hybrid cloud solution, whether you are a reseller, ITSP, system integrator/DSI, or consultant:

Multicloud Offers—You will be able to use Cisco’s four multicloud offers announced at Partner Summit to lead your customers down their multicloud journey, according to their speed and individual needs.

Flexible Packaging and Consumption Models—You’ll be able to mix-and-match a number of Cisco and Google assets encompassing software, hardware, and services to sell to customers. The Cisco software components will be licensed on an annual subscription basis that include one-, three- and five-year terms. The Google cloud services will be offered on a consumption basis.

The Market Leading Developer Platform—You’ll have an open, secure toolset for building and managing modern containerized applications in a multicloud environment. Your customers can leverage Kubernetes on both the Cisco private cloud deployment and Google Container Engine, Istio for microservices management and security, and Google’s Apigee API gateway to access, design, secure and monitor legacy services and data on the private cloud. Read Kip Compton’s blog to learn how application developers can benefit from this partnership.

Software-Defined, Policy-Driven Solution—the Cisco-Google hybrid cloud solution will extend network and security policy, configurations and application monitoring on-premises and in cloud environments. In addition, Cisco’s HyperFlex will provide a cloud-ready hyper-converged platform optimized for Kubernetes and container platform deployments. Cisco CloudCenter (formerly CliQr) allows customers to securely deploy and manage applications in the data center, private clouds and public clouds. And our leading security portfolio, which includes Stealthwatch for advanced threat detection, provides the highest level of security available. This enables our customers to achieve faster time to value and gain the benefits of cloud in a secure, policy-enabled environment. You’ll be able to offer consulting services to help customers optimize application development, transformation and deployment as they adopt hybrid cloud.

All This Wrapped in Cisco Solution Support and Enabled by Our Partner Ecosystem—You’ll be able to get support from Cisco on the entire solution and Cisco can work with Google to get support as required on your customers’ behalf. The benefit to our customers is joint support and ultimately peace of mind. Cisco’s extensive ecosystem of partners like you will help customers on their cloud journey, wherever they are.

This offering will be available to a limited number of customers in the first part of 2018, with planned general availability later in the year.

As we further develop our solution awareness, enablement and sales acceleration plans, we will keep you posted. Until then, we’re looking forward to working with you to make multicloud a successful reality for our customers.

Ken Trombetta