Cisco claims Intercloud strategy a hit with partners

Cisco claims it is experiencing "tremendous interest" in its Intercloud strategy from partners as it unveiled Dimension Data and Sungard Availability Services as its latest cloud allies.

At its Cisco Live event today, Cisco announced that Didata and Sungard will join Telstra as Cisco Intercloud partners, meaning they will align their public cloud infrastructure to the Cisco Cloud architecture.

Cisco unveiled the Intercloud concept in March as part of a $1bn (£594m) investment designed to transform it into the world's largest hybrid cloud vendor.

It also announced today that VCE and NetApp will work closely with it to build "Intercloud-ready" integrated infrastructure solutions.

Some 3,700 Cisco employees are now driving the execution of its cloud strategy, it said as it announced several cloud leadership appointments.

Nick Earle will now lead its Cloud and Managed Services organisation, while Dr Gee Rittenhouse comes in to head the new Cloud and Virtualisation group. Faiyaz Shahpurwala will continue to lead the Cloud Infrastructure and Managed Services Organisation.

Rob Lloyd, president of development and sales at Cisco, said: "Since we introduced Cisco Cloud in late March, we have seen tremendous interest from our valued partners and customers, most of whom are interested in cloud environments that are open, highly secure, extensible, and enable data sovereignty."

Although Didata has signed on as Cisco's first global Intercloud partner, the relationship will also see Cisco take Didata's IaaS offering to market as a Cisco-branded service.

Cisco may have been behind its major rivals in announcing a major cloud push but Adam Pozniak, channel director of cloud solutions at Didata, said the timing of the vendor's entry made sense.

"I think Cisco wanted to see how the cloud market was developing," he told CRN.

"But given that a fundamental component of the Intercloud is leveraging OpenStack APIs, it's probably more about timing."

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