Cisco Steps On the Gas, Pumps Up the Intercloud

If Cisco’s move into the world of cloud computing back in March was a bit late entry, it won’t be lacking in resources. Six months later, the routing giant has doubled down on the ‘Intercloud’. Along with a $1B commitment, they announced 30 new high profile partners and launched a virtualization and orchestration platform aimed at service providers.

Today’s new partners include the international telecommunications giants DT, BT, and NTT. But perhaps most significantly, they also include Equinix, the carrier neutral colo giant which itself is building an ecosystem around its new Cloud Exchange that is pretty complementary to what Cisco is aiming for. At least, it might be, if they coordinate it well.

Cisco says the Intercloud reaches some 250 data centers in 50 countries, and will be deploying its technologies in 16 Equinix markets around the globe. And that $1B will be invested with customers and partners, providing some of the capital needed to jumpstart the ecosystem. $1B is a nice sum of course, yet is pocket change to Cisco.

Whether you like Cisco’s cloud plans or not, you have to admit that ‘Intercloud’ is one of the more perfect buzzwords to emerge in recent years. It manages to invoke two of the most pervasive infrastructure words of the decade without actually carrying any meaning whatsoever. I mean, it’s not as if the cloud isn’t already connected to the internet and thus to itself already.

But that lack of specificity means Cisco can use it to brand just about everything it cares to put under the same umbrella, since there isn’t much of internet infrastructure that hasn’t already got something to do with the cloud revolution at this point. Plenty of potential lies in there somewhere, but at the moment I’m still not quite sure just who makes money where selling what to whom in the Intercloud. But that’s for 2015 to tell us, perhaps.

 

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Categories: Cloud Computing · Telecom Equipment