Applications will shift from open cloud ecosystems back into on premise data centres.

So said Patrick Schmidt, MD DCV EMEAR at Cisco, addressing the firm’s European partners in Rome, Itlay.

He said that 30% of public cloud workloads will be moved back into on-premise data centres‘ hybrid cloud offerings.

He said: "We [Cisco] believe there is no need to move all applications to the open cloud. When it comes to critical workloads, we see customers possibly taking some of those applications back to the hybrid cloud."

Schmidt said the shift from public cloud was part of a set of beliefs around software development and application workloads within Cisco which extend to the rise of containers and micro services.

He said that customers need to deploy software code faster and with less risk in order to obtain the best ROI from their deployment. This helps drive architectural application, app development, orchestration and data centre infrastructure.

Elsewhere, Cisco also believes micro services will be running in containers, however, "they do not have to necessarily do so."

"Micro services will be most likely running on containers but they do not have to," he said.

"As the pieces of deployment are smaller, why would you want to deploy it in a smaller unit/container? [Yet,] we see a huge momentum in the market for containers because of that, and the associated cost to existing stacks."

Schmidt also said that new workloads will move to micro services, driven by the development community.

Cisco’s belief is that micro services will be running fully distributed across on-premise, and off-premise data centre infrastructure stacks.

He said: "This will change application development like never before. Change will, again, be driven by the development community.

"We believe in a future state where application developers will get the accountability to deploy the infrastructure because it is a fully automated stack."

In order to take full benefit from this, Schmidt said that a platform approach is required.

He said: "In the EMEAR region, we see a need to grasp cloud and what it has to offer. We believe customers will put an ‘as [a service]’ layer in the data centre.

"IaaS, cloud, etc, all these need to be integrated as a layer, as one platform."

Cisco is aiming at a "slow but growing market" of application orchestration that sits in an overall space of servers, storage, networks and infrastructure SW worth $74.9bn today, according to Gartner.

This will be driven by a strategy where application orchestration sits on top of monolithic applications (PaaS – Apprenda, Pivotal CF) and cloud native applications (Micro services platform layer – MANTL/Shipped).

Schmidt said: "Our aim is to build Cisco pre-tested and validated designs for those specific applications and needs. For IaaS, management stack, cloud, etc, we will test and validate.

"We want to make sure we ease application management for our customers. Help with the management of the workloads."