Mumbai: Cisco Systems, which created a lot of buzz in the market with the launch of Intercloud, seems to have decided to move on from Intercloud strategy for the time being. Considering the heavy competition in the cloud market and increasing preference to hybrid cloud model, the company has now decided to focus on the hybrid cloud management. The move is likely to impact the channel ecosystem of Cisco which constituted a core part of its Intercloud strategy
Cisco recently released new software and services for helping organizations migrate to cloud-based infrastructure. Commenting on the new development, Fabio Gori, head of Cisco’s cloud marketing says that the company has evolved its cloud strategy from focusing on federating clouds to helping customers build and manage hybrid cloud. However, market experts believe that the move has taken on the sidelines of growing competition to Cisco’s Intercloud from other cloud vendors.
Cisco introduced Intercloud in 2014 with an idea to build a series of connected public clouds developed by Cisco and its partners that would be networked together. Therefore, the Intercloud strategy is widely considered as a partner-centric cloud strategy because it focuses on Cisco partners building out public clouds. The networking vendor also built a policy-based architecture, Intercloud Fabric, which connects the clouds so workloads can be moved back and forth easily. Cisco reportedly enlisted software and data center partners for its Intercloud chain of 350 worldwide, connected data centers
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Company’s new cloud management strategy is more inclined towards helping customers transform an existing infrastructure into a cloud and use public cloud resources. Therefore, partners are apprehensive about their role in the new cloud model. There is also an perception among the channel partners that Cisco has now started to pivot away from talking about Intercloud strategy. However. The company says that it will not impact the channel, in fact the new strategy will expand partners’ horizon.
According to the company, Cisco partners will be able resell cloud infrastructure products to help customers build private clouds. Partners can also resell Cisco infrastructure components and SaaS services such as Cisco’s Web Ex, Spark, CloudLock security and internet of things software.
The recent acquisitions such as Cliqr, CloudLock and ContainerX, clearly show that Cisco is now intends to play in the areas of holistic cloud solutions. Secondly, Cisco has announced new partnerships with Apprenda and Pivotal Cloud Foundry that will help customers deploy application development PaaS platforms. Cisco is also enhancing the functionality of its CloudCenter software that allows customers to deploy applications to multiple different public cloud endpoints. Therefore, it will be interesting to see how the company chalks out its channel plans and align its channel partners with now the new cloud business plans.