Expanding on its March Intercloud announcement, Cisco has announced a number of new cloud partners and customers along with updated cloud service offerings. The company, which now has more than 175 channel partners, is striving to build the world’s largest network of cloud partners and offerings based on a highly secure cloud platform.
In tandem with the news, Cisco also made key cloud organizational leadership appointments. Major new partners include Dimension Data and Sungard Availability Services, which will invest along with Cisco and partner Telstra to align their own public cloud infrastructures with the Cisco Cloud architecture. The end result will be a secure and cost effective means for delivering Cisco Cloud services.
Cisco’s open and hybrid Intercloud is based on the Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) and the Cisco Intercloud Fabric technologies. It is built to handle high-value application workloads and provides near infinite scalability and real-time analytics, according to Cisco.
Solution providers VCE and NetApp also announced they will be working closely with Cisco on Intercloud-ready infrastructure solutions, while Johnson Controls will provide modular data center solutions enabling Cisco partners and customers to quickly scale their computing capacity. And partner Accenture plans to expand cloud management and orchestration capabilities for their Accenture Cloud Platform by licensing Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud software.
"Companies of all sizes need secure, flexible hybrid cloud solutions to respond to evolving market demands,” said Andrew Stern, CEO, Sungard Availability Services. “Our deployment of Cisco's Application Centric Infrastructure coupled with our Sungard AS Enterprise Cloud Service will enable our customers to accelerate the deployment and management of applications in hybrid cloud environments."
"UBC, like many North American cities and municipalities, is facing a threat to its energy sustainability -- increased demand is taxing the existing infrastructure,” said Brent Sauder, director of strategic partnerships, the University of British Columbia. The university is using Cisco EnergyWise cloud energy management services to counteract that through automated management of electricity usage. The initiative expands on UBC’s existing EnergyWise networked devices by 10-fold and the university will also work with Cisco on development of custom interfaces so that additional devices may be managed through the services.
Cisco also announced the appointment of Nick Earle, who will lead the Cloud and Managed Services organization, as well as Dr. Gee Rittenhouse, who will act as leader of the new Cloud and Virtualization Group. Faiyaz Shahpurwala will continue as leader of the Cloud Infrastructure and Managed Services organization.
Edited by
Maurice Nagle