Cisco to Kill Intercloud Services in March 2017

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Cisco has finalized plans to kill off its Intercloud Services effective March 31, 2017, the Register reports.

An end-of-sale and end-of-life announcement in October set a final sale date for Intercloud Fabric for Business and Intercloud Fabric for Providers software of April 12, 2017, and a last date of application support in 2020, but the OpenStack-based platform will begin migrating customers and shut down even sooner.

Originally announced in January 2014 and launched in September of that year to enable workload portability between private and public clouds, Intercloud was then opened to cloud application developers in mid-2015. While Cisco's bet on the popularity of hybrid cloud and “hyper-distributed IT” seems to have been sound, technology relating to workload migration has been evolving.

The Register cites an internal communication from Cloud Platform and Services VP Kip Compton announcing that “the CIS multi-tenant hosting platform will be shut down and all tenants fully migrated to other platforms.” The letter says Cisco will focus instead on “Enterprise Hybrid Cloud and SP Network Function Virtualization.”

A spokesperson from the company confirmed the decision to VentureBeat, and said all workloads will be moved to other infrastructure, including unnamed public clouds.

In a public statement, the company said: “Cisco continually re-evaluates its technology strategy as customers’ needs evolve. The cloud market has shifted considerably in the last two years, and many of our customers are asking Cisco to help them develop cloud strategies that will help drive their digital transformations. With the global availability of cloud offerings, the trend toward rapid application development with microservices, and the ability to orchestrate workloads across private and public clouds, Cisco has evolved its cloud strategy from federating clouds to helping customers build and manage hybrid IT environments. Our cloud strategy centers on building and delivering secure hybrid cloud infrastructure, platforms, and services — with our partners — that offer customers the freedom to choose the best environments and consumption models for their traditional and new cloud-native applications.”

Other public cloud platforms based on OpenStack include HP Helion, which closed down in 2015, and Rackspace public cloud, which lost some of its staff earlier this year. QTS launched an OpenStack public cloud offering in August.