SAN JOSE, Calif. – September 29, 2014 – Cisco today announced that more than 30 additional companies, including Deutsche Telekom, BT, NTT DATA, and Equinix, have added their support to the Intercloud – the worldwide network of interconnected clouds – that Cisco and its partners are rapidly developing to enable a new generation of standardized cloud applications and the proliferation of highly secure hybrid clouds.

Today’s news will expand the reach of the Intercloud by 250 additional data centers in 50 countries, and advances Cisco’s plan to address customer requirements for a globally distributed, highly secure cloud platform capable of meeting the robust demands of the Internet of Everything.  Designed for high-value application workloads, with real-time analytics and “near infinite” scalability, Cisco's open approach to the Intercloud allows local hosting and local provider options that enable data sovereignty.

“Since we announced our OpenStack-based cloud strategy six months ago, we’ve received tremendous industry-wide support. The strategy is gaining momentum in the open source community and providing partners with a powerful cloud platform with global reach, and Internet scale and efficiencies,” said Rob Lloyd, Cisco’s president of development and sales.  “Just as Cisco played a leading role in connecting isolated islands of LANs to architect the modern Internet, Cisco’s Intercloud Fabric and Application Centric Infrastructure innovations uniquely position us to connect disparate cloud services to unlock the full potential of cloud, and with it a new era in IT.”

Cisco, the leader in private cloud infrastructure technology, also announced that it will begin offering a hybrid cloud service and that Cisco Intercloud Fabric, a highly secure, open, and flexible hypervisor-agnostic cloud interconnect technology, is now shipping to customers.

Editor’s Note: Cisco will be joined by DT, BT and Equinix in a web news conference Monday, September 29, at 7:30 a.m. PDT to discuss all of these developments. Click here to register.

 

Deutsche Telekom and Cisco to Develop German and European Clouds, Address Data Sovereignty

Deutsche Telekom (DT) and Cisco announced that the two companies will expand their partnership by deploying Intercloud nodes within DT’s state-of-the-art data centers in Germany, which will be operated by T-Systems, the system solutions unit of DT. T-Systems will deliver sovereign and secure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings that meet Germany’s strict data protection standards to business customers throughout the European region.

Deutsche Telekom’s new Intercloud infrastructure, based on OpenStack to allow DT to standardize and scale their services globally, will incorporate Cisco’s suite of cloud solutions, including Cisco Intercloud Fabric and Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), which includes Cisco Nexus 9000 Series switches  and the Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC).  Together, these advanced technologies will provide DT with a robust and holistic Intercloud architecture with centralized automation and policy-driven application profiles.

 

BT to Deploy Cisco Intercloud Fabric to Drive Hybrid Cloud Adoption

BT and Cisco will expand their longstanding cloud partnering in delivering leading cloud solutions to the market. BT will leverage Cisco Intercloud Fabric to develop hybrid cloud services that connect with the Cisco Cloud and with the cloud and managed service offerings of Cisco Powered Intercloud Providers. The BT Cloud Compute infrastructure, with a global data centre footprint spanning 20 countries on five continents, will become fully Intercloud enabled to support highly secure, global hybrid clouds with unparalleled workload portability for BT’s customers.

BT Cloud Compute is a pre-provisioned data centre infrastructure that enables customers to create, deploy, monitor and manage their own cloud service. It integrates advanced Cisco technologies and is available in major economies across Europe, the Americas, the Middle East and Africa and Asia Pacific. Cloud Compute uses local infrastructure in key regions, allowing customers to meet national compliance and assurance requirements and to communicate and contract under the jurisdiction of the local law. With its adoption of Cisco Intercloud Fabric, BT is at the forefront of the realities of enabling hybrid cloud today on a global scale.

 

Equinix to Accelerate Connections between Private and Public Clouds

Equinix and Cisco will partner to provide enterprise customers with more secure, resilient and efficient interconnections to public clouds. The companies plan to develop a hosted private cloud solution that utilizes the Equinix Cloud Exchange to deliver highly secure private access to the rich ecosystem of cloud service providers in Equinix data centers globally. Cisco plans to deploy Intercloud capabilities in 16 Equinix markets across Europe, Asia and the Americas. Equinix also plans to deploy key Cisco technologies and services across its Cloud Exchange, including the Cisco Nexus 9000 Series switch, Cisco APIC, and the Cisco Evolved Services Platform.

 

Cisco Adds Over 30 New Intercloud Partners

Cisco is recruiting and enabling partners across the Intercloud ecosystem—from cloud providers, cloud builders and cloud aggregators, to technology partners, independent software vendors (ISV) and cloud resellers.

• Intercloud Providers: Cisco announced that 26 new cloud providers are joining the Intercloud partner ecosystem. To deliver a next generation of Intercloud-enabled cloud services, these cloud providers will embrace Cisco ACI and Intercloud Fabric. They include Adapt, ANS Group, BT, CGI Group, Cirrity, CTI, Deutsche Telekom, Ethan Group, Infront Systems, LightEdge Solutions, LG CNS, Logicalis, Long View, Netelligent, NWN, NTT DATA, OneNeck IT Solutions, OnX Managed Services, Peak 10, Presidio, Proxios, PT Portugal/Oi, Quest Media and Supplies, Steria, Virtustream and Wipro.

• Intercloud Builders: Dimension Data, Forsythe Technology, Presidio and World Wide Technology are the first solution providers to commit to a new channel program to build Intercloud-ready private clouds based on Cisco Intercloud Fabric.

• Intercloud Aggregators: Comstor, Ingram Micro Inc. and Tech Data will become cloud aggregators for Cisco, providing a one-stop shop to enable and accelerate channel partners’ ability to resell cloud services.  

 

Building Momentum with Current Intercloud Partners

Cisco continues to build momentum with existing Intercloud partners, including Dimension Data, Johnson Controls, Sungard Availability Services, Telstra, NetApp, Red Hat and VCE.  Highlights include:

• Telstra, which became Cisco’s first Intercloud partner in March 2014, recently announced the expansion of its Cisco Cloud Services capability beyond Australia to Hong Kong and Singapore, leading the way in providing customers with choice across private and public clouds with the flexibility in how to consume them.
• Dimension Data and Cisco are partnering to deliver a hybrid cloud solution for customers and resellers that will combine IaaS with Cisco technology and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications. 
• Sungard Availability Services is using its cloud infrastructure to deliver new Cisco Powered cloud services to customers and resellers. It recently became the first service provider globally to deploy the Cisco APIC Controller to drive cloud services. 
• Red Hat recently announced it is teaming with Cisco to deliver an OpenStack-based integrated infrastructure solution. The new solution will support Cisco ACI to deliver an on-ramp to the Intercloud for enterprise and mid-market customers.

 

New Hybrid Cloud Offerings

Cisco today began offering Cisco Hybrid Cloud bundles, packages of technology and services, which will help customers create hybrid cloud environments.  One bundle will allow customers already using a private cloud to extend that infrastructure to Cisco’s IaaS offering.  Another will help customers not yet using a private cloud to gain that capability via a complete hybrid cloud and multinational IaaS solution.  

Because the Cisco Hybrid Cloud bundles are based on Cisco Intercloud Fabric and Cisco ACI, they offer workload portability to and from the private cloud, consistent security and policy management when applications and workloads move between data centers, and enterprise-grade reliability and performance.

 

Cisco Intercloud Fabric Now Available

Cisco Intercloud Fabric, which becomes available to customers today, is a powerful software-based building block for true hybrid cloud infrastructures. True hybrid cloud infrastructures unify the management of public cloud services, including Microsoft Azure, AWS and other offerings.  It also enables hybrid cloud workload portability between public cloud providers, private clouds and Cisco Cloud services.

 

Cisco’s Cloud-based Managed Services Solution Opens $62 Billion Market for Service Providers

Cisco also announced that its Evolved Services Platform (ESP) now enables cloud providers to deliver two new virtualized and automated managed business services: Security and Cloud VPN.  ESP is a comprehensive virtualization and orchestration software platform that creates, automates and provisions services in real time across compute, storage and network functions. Cisco's ESP solutions are designed to help cloud providers address the fast-growing global managed services market, which is expected to grow to $62 billion dollars by 2019 (sources: Frost and Sullivan, U.S. Census, Cisco).

 

Cisco Capital Commits $1 Billion in Financing for Cloud Technologies and Services

Cisco Capital has earmarked $1 billion to provide financial solutions that help Cisco customers and partners accelerate the adoption of Cisco technologies needed to transition to Cisco Powered clouds. Cisco Capital offers will focus on financing Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure; facilitating technology migrations; and providing flexible payment structures. Cisco Capital is a wholly owned subsidiary of Cisco, specializing in providing financing solutions for Cisco’s customers and channel partners worldwide.

 

Executive and Partner Quotes

Reinhard Clemens, Board Member of Deutsche Telekom and CEO of T-Systems: “As our customers get more sophisticated about using the cloud, they are demanding true hybrid clouds and the ability to easily use clouds in many different countries.  By offering the Cisco Intercloud platform, we will be able to deliver simple and cost-effective clouds and true hybrid services to our customers throughout Europe – in compliance with our strict data protection regulations in Germany, which is a critical factor in business today. If you want a strong foothold in the European market, you need to be strong in Germany. We will help Cisco implement its cloud strategy in Germany and the rest of Europe.”

Ashish Gupta, President, Portfolio, Service Design and BT Advise, BT Global Services: “To truly realise possibilities in the cloud, our customers need improved performance and availability of mission-critical applications. At the same time, they are governed by local compliance rules and their data needs to remain highly secure. This requires hybrid cloud environments, combining public and private assets, and the ability to accommodate a wide variety of vendors and service providers. Our use of Cisco’s Intercloud Fabric, combined with our well-established Cloud Compute infrastructure, enables such environments on a global scale. It allows us to better help CIOs orchestrate their cloud resources with a focus on seamless workload control and portability. BT is clearly at the core of that innovative drive.”

Ihab Tarazi, Chief Technology Officer, Equinix: “What Cisco and Equinix are doing together is all about visibility and control. By connecting Cisco Intercloud and Cloud Exchange, we are adding policy, performance, security and visibility all the way to the application level, removing performance concerns sometimes associated with hybrid cloud services. Elasticity is essential for enterprises, and by providing a private, high bandwidth, highly secure infrastructure, we’re allowing enterprises to achieve their vision of a truly elastic cloud.”

 

Supporting Materials:
 

• Blog from Rob Lloyd, Cisco president of development and sales: Intercloud, The Next Internet Starts Here
• Blog from Nick Earle, Cisco’s senior vice president of cloud and managed services: The Role of Connectivity in Powering the Intercloud: Equinix
• Blog from Edison Peres, Cisco’s senior vice president of cloud and managed services partner organization: Partners Take Center Stage with Intercloud
• Blog from Kelly Ahuja, Cisco’s senior vice president of Cisco’s service provider group: Cisco and Service Providers – Transformation for the Internet of Everything
• Video from Nick Earle explaining the Intercloud and outlining Cisco’s four key differentiators
• Join @Cisco on Twitter at 9:30 a.m. PDT today for a tweet chat with Nick Earle, senior vice president of cloud and managed services sales, on the expanding Intercloud ecosystem. http://twtvite.com/intercloudchat Follow the conversation at #IntercloudChat.
• Additional information about the Cisco Cloud
• Additional information about Cisco Intercloud Fabric

 

Partner Blogs and News

• News Release: Unique Partnership: Deutsche Telekom Pioneers Cisco’s Intercloud in Europe
• News Release: Cisco and Equinix Partner to Accelerate Connections Between Private and Public Clouds
• Blog from Adapt: Emergence of the Cloud Service Integrator
• Blog from Comstor: Delivering on the Promise of Intercloud (Geoff Fancher, Senior Vice President, Comstor US)
• Blog from CTI: CTI to become first Cisco Intercloud partner in Russia
• Blog from Dimension Data: Enterprise Value with a Hybrid Cloud Strategy (Stephen Nola, Group Executive, IT-as-a-Service)
• Blog from Equinix: Equinix-Cisco partnership brings value, stability and security to hybrid cloud solutions (Ihab Tarazi, Chief Technology Officer, Equinix)
• Blog from Ingram Micro: Why a Cloud Management Platform is a Hybrid Cloud Must-Have (Renee Bergeron, Vice President, Cloud Computing)
• Blog from LightEdge Solutions: LightEdge Joins Cisco Intercloud Partner Ecosystem
• Blog from OneNeck IT Solutions: Cisco adds more than 30 new Intercloud partners, including OneNeck® IT Solutions
• Blog from Peak 10: Peak 10 Partners with Cisco to Unify and Strengthen Hybrid Clouds in Preparation for the Internet of Everything
• Blog from Tech Data: Partnering to Drive Cloud Services (Angie Beltz, VP, Cisco Solutions Group)
• News Release: Cisco and Red Hat Deliver Integrated Infrastructure for OpenStack
• News Release: Cisco and Dimension Data to Accelerate Global Hybrid Cloud Adoption

 

About Cisco

Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) is the worldwide leader in IT that helps companies seize the opportunities of tomorrow by proving that amazing things can happen when you connect the previously unconnected. For ongoing news, please go to http://thenetwork.cisco.com.

###

Cisco and the Cisco logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. A listing of Cisco's trademarks can be found at www.cisco.com/go/trademarks. Third-party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word partner does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company.

 

Forward-Looking Statements

This release may be deemed to contain forward-looking statements, which are subject to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements include, among others, statements regarding building momentum with current cloud partners, addition of new partners to expand the scope of the Intercloud, Cisco’s plans to architect the world’s largest Intercloud, Cisco’s new cloud offerings (including a new hybrid cloud offering), development of German and European clouds, delivery of new cloud solutions, and Cisco Capital’s commitment to providing financing for cloud technologies and services that involve risks and uncertainties. Readers are cautioned that these forward-looking statements are only predictions and may differ materially from actual future events or results due to a variety of factors, including, among other things the ability of the companies to partner successfully, the ability to achieve expected benefits of our partnerships, business and economic conditions and growth trends in the networking industry, our customer markets and various geographic regions; global economic conditions and uncertainties in the geopolitical environment; overall information technology spending; the growth and evolution of the Internet and levels of capital spending on Internet-based systems; variations in customer demand for products and services, including sales to the service provider market and other customer markets; the return on our investments and in certain geographical locations; increased competition in our product and service markets, including the data center; dependence on the introduction and market acceptance of new product offerings and standards; rapid technological and market change; and other factors listed in Cisco's most recent report on Form 10-K filed on September 9, 2014. Any forward-looking statements in this release are based on limited information currently available to Cisco, which is subject to change, and Cisco will not necessarily update the information.