A year ago, Cisco Systems Inc. announced its plans to invest one billion dollars in a cloud computing company to compete with six billion dollar Amazon Web Services. This plan was christened with the name Intercloud.

At the Cisco Live annual conference, the company revealed its plans to take the Intercloud a step forward. The Intercloud will not offer this cloud itself from its own data centers but will instead unify smaller cloud service providers onto a large platform of products that will be compatible with each other.  The Intercloud will prevent the smaller providers from losing customers to Amazon while allowing Cisco to continue to sell these providers hardware as they grow and develop. So, the aim of Intercloud is to enable these smaller providers and Cisco to unify and compete with Amazon.

In addition, Cisco is opening the Intercloud marketplace, an app store that gives customers the tools, software, and technology they need to quickly and efficiently use their cloud. Cisco is partnering up with many tech companies like Hortonworks and Docker for this marketplace, which will 35 apps.

Cisco also announced the development of the Intercloud Fabric, which will allow customers to manage and control their data centers and Intercloud at the same time. The Inter cloud Fabric makes it easier for customers to manage what can be a very tough technology. Cloud service providers like Datalink, Peak 10, and Sungard Availability Services have already backed Cisco’s plan to develop the Intercloud Fabric.

Cisco insists that while Amazon Web Services may have a head start in the cloud computing market, cloud computing still has much room to grow, making it anyone’s game.

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