Cisco Cloud Strategy: Deep cooperation is the future trend

Guide: Cisco has issued a statement saying it has no plans to compete with "on-demand" cloud-computing providers such as Amazon, and will sell infrastructure and supply its software products to those cloud companies in a way that serves them.

At the Cisco Live User conference, which opened in Los Angeles in early July, Padmasree Warrior, chief technology officer, said in a statement in Monday that Cisco would use virtualization as the next-generation core processing model and its unified Computing System Computing systems are designed specifically for the first step toward full virtualization of data centers. Cisco also attended the Federation of Business and service providers, it has also become an ideal partner for companies planning to adopt cloud computing, because they want to reap the benefits of cloud systems, such as flexible scalability, and the ability to implement disaster recovery without impacting corporate infrastructure controls.

Just as all the major vendors are looking for their niche in cloud technology, Cisco is looking for it. Warrior says Cisco's path to development is different from its rivals, such as Hewlett-Packard and IBM, the first batch of IBM-oriented offerings for cloud platforms for business-custom cloud, because those vendors are selling cloud computing resources. Cisco, however, does not see great business opportunities in this area.

Warrior says there are four levels of cloud computing: Software as a service (SaaS), a development platform that serves, capacity as a service, and the infrastructure to provide the services described above. Cisco has provided "software as a service" and IronPort security products in its WebEx collaborative form. Its WebEx connect can be used in the development of third party application software, which is "Platform as service". Cisco will leave the market space for sales of raw capacity to other companies and provide infrastructure to these companies.

Warrior said that with the availability of a rented Cisco Cloud infrastructure while accessing the public cloud and moving data smoothly, applying software and computing load, the enterprise maintained its IT resources. Cisco's unified Computing system process, which combines the company's new blade server platform with network and storage components, is one of the steps to achieve these functions. This is a former integration structure--shifting the pressure of manual system integration. The company has sold UCS processing systems to some consumers.

She added that Cisco did not expect to build a completely closed system between the enterprise and the cloud Vendor network. One end of the infrastructure could not be Cisco's product. The company's goal is to achieve its own cloud products and other suppliers of the coordinated operation of the system.

Dennerline, senior vice-president of Cisco's collaborative software division, says the company is also upgrading its WebEx SaaS collaboration offerings. Cisco is upgrading its WebEx interface to win a major user base other than the early adopters, which form the majority of its user base.

The software will focus on the individual collaborators of the enterprise users, not the virtual meeting space. For example, users can view their historical conversations with this person by clicking on a contact in the company's internal HTC list, such as a shared meeting. If there is a historical meeting record, the relevant records will pop up.

Cisco also took advantage of last year's acquisition of Postpath technology, while consolidating the existing technology of the company Jabber, and creating a cloud-based email system, he said. The company's process of moving mobile users to the WebEx system continues, with more than 150,000 downloads of WebEx software currently available for the iphone. Cisco has also talked to mobile users in the Motion, Nokia and Samsung companies.

Cloud computing is the key to working together because the next wave of productivity gains comes from in-house collaboration.

Abner Germanow, an analyst at IDC, said the deep cooperation between companies is a current trend, yet most of the interactive tools so far have been within the company. This is where Cisco has the advantage over its competitors, Microsoft and IBM, whose interactive offerings are mainly for in-house collaboration. And the faster companies begin to adopt collaborative products between companies, the better for Cisco. Because the competitors are struggling to keep up. However, this trend may take 2-5 years to come.