Private cloud is here to stay: Cisco

Cisco Systems is confident that Australia will be the global market leader to take up its big cloud play that has been dubbed Intercloud. 

Speaking to a room of media this week, Cisco development and sales president Robert Lloyd said Intercloud — which the company initially announced in March as part of its US$1 billion investment to secure its position in the cloud computing market — is an "enterprise response to the multiple uses of cloud technology that is expected to unfold in the next decade".

"We have heard for a year or two about the construct of the market, and how it has been trying to respond to the complexity that has emerged in networking ... [but] command line interface network units that's expected to lead to the agility and flexibility that customers are looking for today isn't going to be the answer," he said.

Lloyd believes Cisco's Intercloud solution and ecosystem will be "more vibrant" in Australia because "private cloud is not going away", especially as regulatory pressures to keep data in-country heightens. Recent information released by Wikileaks has shown that 50 countries including Australia may be signing away rights to ensure sensitive customer data remains in its country of origin, as part of negotiations for new financial services rules for operating between participating countries.

"It will be here first, so it will be interesting to watch it play out. We have a very vibrant Amazon, a very impactful Azure and Microsoft cloud, we have a lot of successful private cloud deployments because private cloud is at the heart of what we see to be the true vision of Intercloud," he said.

So far, Cisco has signed Telstra as its first global customer where Telstra will launch cloud services based on Cisco's Intercloud platform by the end of 2014. As part of the deal Cisco will be operating and controlling the telco's cloud platform in its datacentre and using Telstra's mobile network in Australia.

Cisco has also signed with Dimension Data for help on laying the building blocks for the hybrid cloud infrastructure and reaching emerging markets.

Lloyd anticipates globally there will be eight to 10 Intercloud global providers that will embrace all of its Intercloud building blocks, including ACI, OpenStack, Hyper-V, and vSphere.

"We will see a world of many clouds. Our intention is to demonstrate the network and the cloud will come together in a very important way."

Cisco ANZ vice president Ken Boal also commented that Intercloud will help drive productivity and remove complexities that exists when it comes to "moving parts of an infrastructure into a vanilla platform".

"The selling point for Intercloud is just that it offers choice and flexibility of combing private and public across multiple platforms and hyervisors," he said.

But Cisco is not alone in this approach to the cloud. Towards the end of last year, IBM cooked up its version of  InterCloud, a cloud-of-clouds approach designed to tie services together and avoid vendor lock-in.