Networking hardware company Cisco said overnight it will partner with telcos and systems integrators to build what it termed an "Intercloud", or connected clouds, as part of a two-year, billion dollar plan.
The Intercloud can be seen as a hybrid cloud offering, as workloads such as data and applications can be moved between public and private clouds securely and with ease as required.
Telstra is the first of Cisco's partners to join the global Intercloud project, with services to be offered in Australia by the end of this year.
“Our customers will now have access to cloud infrastructure from a global leader, allowing them to select the cloud service to meet their requirements and scale network and cloud resources to deliver service agility, security and performance," Erez Yarkoni, executive director of Telstra's global enterprise and services division said.
Other Cisco partners worldwide include Ingram Micro, Logicalis Group, Canopy and Wipro. Cisco's Intercloud will be hosted in the company's and its partners' data centres around the world.
The OpenStack based Intercloud will feature an application programming interface for rapid development, real-time analytics, secure architecture and high scalability along with full compliance with local data sovereignty laws, the company promised.
Multiple enterprise offerings will be available as part of the Intercould services, including SAP HANA, PaaS and IaaS, desktop-as-a-service, collaboration through WebEx, and IT service management services among several options.
Apart from the Intercloud project, Cisco also announced it would partner with enterprise Linux vendor Red Hat to extend OpenStack for open and interoperable cloud environments.
A cloud management solution, the Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud 4.0 that allows companies to deploy clouds through a service catalogue, was also launched.
Cisco, which pioneered internetworking devices such as routers, has been late to respond to the cloud computing wave that is built on commodity hardware, and which is dominated by Amazon, Google and Microsoft.
However, with the Intercloud, Cisco promises to make up for lost time.
"Our cloud will be the world’s first truly open, hybrid cloud. The Cisco Intercloud will be built upon industry-leading Cisco cloud technologies and leverage OpenStack for its open standards-based global infrastructure.
"We’ll support any workload, on any hypervisor and interoperate with any cloud," Robert Lloyd, Cisco's president for sales and development said.
Lloyd believes that the cloud initiative will expand the market for Cisco and its partners from US$22 billion today to US$88 billion in the coming years up to 2017.
iTnews revealed yesterday that IAG's Michael Gindy had left the business to work on establishing the Cisco/Telstra partnership in Australia.
