Playing to their strength, the Cisco vision of the future of the cloud announcement doesn’t bring forth any major undertakings that would put them in a head-to-had battle with cloud services and storage providers such as Amazon or Google, but rather adds software and services to their existing infrastructure product lines packaged in such a way as to deliver an overall framework for corporate cloud implementations.
Cisco is taking a three-pronged approach to their CloudVerse that puts together existing hardware and technology packages with a few new pieces of software and services that define the different aspects of the cloud. Basically, the three components are the traditional datacenter pieces (storage, networking, IT resources), the pieces that make up the connections to the cloud, and the cloud applications. Cisco considers those first two elements, the Cisco Unified Data Center and the Cisco Cloud Intelligent Network the cloud enablement services.
Cisco is positioning their unified services model as the core of their CloudVerse. With the projected need for businesses to access specific cloud services from many different sources they are configuring their customer’s installations to be able to utilize cloud-based data regardless of where it resides by building a solid infrastructure using the existing Cisco technologies. This model gives those customers a consistent interface into the utilization and management of the srvices that IT needs to deliver to the end-user. It simplifies IT’s workload by allowing the same familiar infrastructure to continue to support the needs of the business computing environment even as it moves outwards, beyond the wall s of the traditional datacenter.
This model increases the value of Cisco solutions for their customer base. By enabling these customers to continue their investment in Cisco’s Unified technologies while extending their reach into the cloud, as cloud technologies become more prevalent, these customers see a large degree of future proofing of their Cisco investment.
