Cisco Partners With Ingram Micro, Others for Intercloud
Cisco plans to build the world’s largest global Intercloud – a network of clouds – together with a set of partners that include Telstra, Allstream, Canopy and Ingram Micro Inc.
The Cisco global Intercloud is being built for the Internet of Everything with a distributed network and security architecture designed for high-value application workloads, real-time analytics, “near infinite” scalability and full compliance with local data sovereignty laws. The first-of-its-kind open Intercloud, which will feature APIs for rapid application development, will deliver a new enterprise-class portfolio of cloud IT services for businesses, service providers and resellers, the company said.
Cisco expects to invest more than $1 billion to build its expanded cloud business over the next two years. Its business model, which enables partner capabilities and investments, is expected to generate a rapid acceleration of additional investment to drive its intended global scale and breadth of services.
“The timing is right for Cisco and its partners to invest in a groundbreaking, application-centric global Intercloud to provide broader reach and faster time to market,” said Robert Lloyd, president of development and sales, Cisco. “Together, we have the capability to enable a seamless world of many clouds in which our customers have the choice to enable the right highly secure cloud for the right workload while creating strategic advantages for rapid innovation, and ultimately, business growth.”
The networked connection of people, data, processes and things, dubbed the Internet of Everything, is expected to be a $19 trillion economic opportunity in the coming decade. Cisco says the IoE movement, which is creating an entirely new set of requirements for globally distributed and highly secure clouds, has empowered Cisco and its partners to initiate the development of a massively scalable, flexible and highly secure Intercloud to deliver the mobile, collaborative and rich video cloud services that enable today’s new connected experiences.
The Cisco OpenStack-enabled Intercloud is designed to allow organizations and users to combine and move workloads – including data and applications – across different public or private clouds as needed while maintaining associated network and security policies. It will also utilize Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure to optimize application performance and to make rolling out new services much faster. Cisco will improve application security, compliance, auditing and mobility by using ACI’s centralized, programmable security policy to enable fine-grained control and isolation at scale.
