Cisco has extended its cloud and data centre relationship with Microsoft with a new platform which is designed to accelerate service delivery and streamline the path to Intercloud for cloud providers.
The Cisco Cloud Architecture for the Microsoft Cloud Platform looks to address the issues faced by next generation cloud services. The integrated solution will combine the Windows Azure Pack and Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure.
The requirements for next generation cloud services include a need for closer compatibility between hardware and software as well as network, storage and compute. This can lead to increased cost and complexity of integrating infrastructure.
An additional announcement came from fourteen cloud providers who have stated that they are planning to join Cisco’s Intercloud partner ecosystem. This means that the Intercloud now consists of more than 60 providers and over 350 data centres.
Aziz Benmalek, general manager, Hosting Service Providers, Microsoft, said: "Cisco and Microsoft already have a strong relationship in the cloud and data center markets."
"Today, we’re expanding that collaboration with a solution that will allow our mutual partners to deliver services quickly and grow revenue faster with a cloud-enabled platform."
"The work we’ve done to integrate Cisco ACI with Windows Azure Pack will allow cloud providers to dramatically accelerate time-to-market, while decreasing costs. Together, Cisco and Microsoft are helping our partners evolve with current market demand and rapidly shifting customer needs."
The Cisco Cloud Architecture for the Microsoft Cloud Platform will provide help for cloud providers to be able to move beyond traditional IaaS in order to create combined IaaS, PaaS and SaaS solutions.
One of the benefits of the partnership will see services delivered at the speed of DevOps, which will aid with the reduction of cost of ownership and speeding up the time-to-revenue.
The collaboration will also deliver pre-packaged policy management libraries which will allow cloud providers to be able to implement applications more quickly and with a more consistent policy management.
Nick Earle, senior vice president, Cloud and Managed Services, Cisco, said: "We want our service provider partners to move up-market with us and offer higher-end cloud services."
"By partnering with Microsoft we’re able to deliver a tightly integrated, application centric cloud architecture. This unique new platform will help our partners dramatically accelerate the delivery of new and innovative hybrid cloud services for their customers."
In order to support the partners in the ecosystem that Cisco and Microsoft have built, a full lifecycle-go-to market approach will deliver service ideation, demand generation and customer retention.
