Cisco on Tuesday publicly rolled out its cloud computing strategy dubbed CloudVerse, which is a framework that blends together its software, data center and collaboration portfolios.
It may be a bit surprising that Cisco hasn’t outlined a cloud strategy given that its gear is in the middle of most data centers. But Eric Schoch, senior director for hosted collaboration solutions at Cisco, said the networking giant needed to outline where it thought the market was headed. “Because of our position in the network, it’s presupposed that the strategy is there,” said Schoch. “But we wanted to publicly announce a strategy that’s backed by a belief system where the market is going.”
Where’s the market going? “To a world of many clouds,” argued Cisco.
The Cisco cloud strategy isn’t all that surprising since it features many building blocks the company already has. Perhaps the most notable item is that Cisco will offer its networking and data center software as a service.
According to Schoch, the move to a cloud and subscription model reflects the reality that some customers may be 35 percent through a deployment and need cloud services to speed up the rollout. “There are lots of hybrid scenarios,” he said.
Under the Cisco CloudVerse umbrella is the following:
- Intelligent automation tools for cloud delivery.
- Network services management software that can create, deploy and modify physical and virtual resources.
- Cloud-to-cloud connect, a network positioning system on ASR 1000 and 9000 series routers to launch in 2012.
- Hosted collaboration software for private clouds, mobile delivery and collaboration.
- A carrier-grade private cloud offering for large enterprises.
- Cisco services to roll out those aforementioned parts.
Integrators such as Xerox’s ACS, Fujitsu, Telecom Italia, Telstra and Verizon’s Terremark unit are adopting the Cisco framework.
