Cisco Spends $1bn On Interconnected Cloud Project

BT, Deutsche Telekom, NTT Data and Equinix are among over 30 partners that have been signed up by Cisco as part of its Intercloud project to built a global network of interconnected clouds.

The latest $1 billion [£620 million] injection means that Intercloud’s reach will extend to 250 additional data centres in 50 countries to fulfil customer requirements for a highly secure cloud platform that can meet the demands of the Internet of Everything.

“Just as Cisco played a leading role in connecting isolated islands of LANs to architect the modern Internet, Cisco’s Intercloud Fabric and Application Centric Infrastructure innovations uniquely position us to connect disparate cloud services to unlock the full potential of cloud, and with it a new era in IT,” said Rob Lloyd, Cisco’s president of development and sales. 

Cisco’s approach to Intercloud is designed to handle high-value app workloads thanks to its real-time analytics and what it called “near infinite” scalability.

Cisco also announced that it is ready to start offering a hybrid cloud service to its customers and that the Intercloud Fabric, a secured, open and flexible hypervisor-agnostic cloud interconnect technology, has started to ship to its customers.

“Since we announced our OpenStack-based cloud strategy six months ago, we’ve received tremendous industry-wide support. The strategy is gaining momentum in the open source community and providing partners with a powerful cloud platform with global reach, and Internet scale and efficiencies,” Lloyd added.

When it comes to the UK, BT plans to use the Intercloud Fabric to work on hybrid cloud services that are able to connect with the Cisco Cloud as well as managed service offerings from Cisco-basked Intercloud Providers. As well as this, BT will expand Cisco’s cloud services to its data centres in over 20 countries.

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