Cisco set to plough $1bn into cloud services

Vendor reveals details of new 'Cisco Cloud Services' busines to Wall Street Journal ahead of its global conference, which starts today

Networking giant Cisco is planning a cloud services offensive, unveiling its intentions to spend $1bn on the technology over the next two years.

The money will be spent building datacentres to help run its new service, that it is christening Cisco Cloud Services. And it is widely believed that its channel partners will play a vital role in bringing this service to life.

But despite having thousands of partners, customers and staff in Las Vegas this week for the start of its global conference, the vendor chose to reveal all to the Wall Street Journal, several hours before its first keynote was due to start.

Rob Lloyd, Cisco president of development and sales told the WSJ: “Companies are looking for different ways to get IT done. Everybody is realising the cloud can be a vehicle for achieving better economics [and] lower cost.”

He insisted that the move was not a direct salvo at current web services supremo, Amazon.

“It does not mean that we’re embarking on a strategy to go head-to-head with Amazon,” he said.

Stay tuned to Channelweb for Sam Trendall’s coverage of the Cisco conference this week.