Cisco is bolstering its Intercloud programme by partnering with ISVs

Cisco is bolstering its Intercloud strategy this week, announcing partnerships with 35 ISVs which the company said would help create and offer a wider range of cloud services based on Cisco infrastructure.

The company announced the impending launch of an Intercloud Marketplace that will be populated with apps certified to run on Intercloud infrastructure, due to go live in autumn this year.

Cisco said it is partnering with a range of commercial app and development companies including Apprenda, Active State and Docker to make their cloud developer environments work on the Intercloud platform.

The company is also partnering with big data solution providers including MapR, Hortonworks, Cloudera and the Apache Hadoop Community to offer hybrid cloud big data implementation support. Additionally, it said it would expose APIs to enable software-based control of networking and security, a move it claims will help developers create Internet of Things services more effectively.

Cisco’s Intercloud strategy has been somewhat of a slow burner, even by Cisco’s own estimates. The company has about 100 Intercloud customers and 65 partners globally, though last month Cisco chairman and chief executive John Chambers said the programme would pick up pace as it moved into “phase 2” of the Intercloud strategy, which is what the Marketplace is all about.

“The pieces that we were missing was how do you go into this new environment where each of these “public clouds in clouds” are separate? And you have to be on different vendors or different companies’ tech to have the ability to go into it. So what we’re looking at first is an architecture and it cements our relationships in service providers. And then it really comes through to how you monetise it over time,” he said at the time.

“This will just take time to monetize, but the effect we see indirectly is already huge when you talk about a Deutsche Telekom or a Telstra and our relationships with those.”