Pivotal and Cisco are to jointly will jointly offer an enterprise cloud service designed to help developers work quicker.
A global agreement between the two will see Cisco partners resell Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry services blended alongside Cisco’s own Metapod offering. The selling point for the combined service is the promise that it will help companies set up cloud native applications quicker, from a wider choice of hosted, public and private clouds.
While Cisco’s OpenStack-based Metapod is designed to run on company premises the Pivotal Cloud Foundry is available to clients as an externally hosted system. Cloud Foundry’s main promise is to improve the productivity of developers, fine tune operations and provide IT systems with enterprise grade security, scalability and availability. Both system take different approaches to a common delivery goal, to help companies get their software to market faster.
Under the terms of the Cisco Solution Partner Program, which is part of the Cisco Partner Ecosystem, Cisco and third-party independent hardware, software and technology vendors integrate various IT systems and offer them to clients. As a Cisco Solution Partner, Pivotal has already been granted Cisco compatibility certification and offers 24X7 customer support.
Cloud Foundry has five major elements to its service. Microservices help developers to move faster by using composable services designed for independent deployment, scaling and recovery. Containers help create a flexible, secure and manageable workload which can be distributed and scheduled in order to create greater efficiency. Cloud Foundry’s Open Source is backed by contributions from over 40 members of the Cloud Foundry Foundation. A short software delivery cycle is the aim of the Continuous Delivery element of Cloud Foundry, while the DevOps element can provide a structured platform for app creation.
The integration of Cisco Metapod and Pivotal Cloud Foundry marries the top managed private cloud with the leading Cloud Native developer experience, according to Peder Ulander, Cisco’s VP of Cloud and Managed Services. The goal is to help customers “quickly and easily modernize their IT,” said Ulnder.
The combination of Metapod and Clod Foundry gives companies the clout of an enterprise but the stealth of an SME, according to James Watters, senior VP of Products at Pivotal. Enterprises can use the cloud service to build “next generation applications that rival that of Silicon Valley’s most renowned start-ups,” said Watters.