Cisco Systems sees Cloud infrastructure provision as the way ahead, choosing not to go head to head with the likes of Amazon in the public Cloud market. At the Cisco Live user conference in San Francisco, Chief Technology Officer Padmasree Warrior argued that Cisco's established enterprise and service provider installed base makes it an ideal partner for other Cloud Computing vendors.
Essentially Cisco will leave selling raw capacity to others, while supplying the infrastructure for such companies. The firm's Unified Computing Systems (UCS) combines networking and storage with computing and is being positioned as an architectural foundation on which to build private Clouds.
Warrior defined four layers in Cisco's vision of Cloud Computing: Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), capacity as a service, and underlying infrastructure. “Cisco's strategy is to play in the SaaS, platform as a service and the IT foundation layer," she said. "We do not have plans to become an IT-as-a-service provider. In other words, we will enable service providers by supplying them with infrastructure rather than provide compute as a service.
"IT as a service, in the sense of us actually selling compute resources as utility computing, is something we won't get into, as it is counter to our business model. It would require us to build huge data centres and invest billions of dollars. Plus, it puts us in competition with the service providers who are our customers today. I don't see us doing that as a mainstream business."
Instead, enablement and alliances seem to be the order of the day. "Having a great portfolio of products gets a seat at the table to talk to our customers," Warrior said. "Once we do that, then they expect us to start bringing groups of products together, build them and test them so they work together, and then add technical services on top of that. Once we have the architecture leadership, we then become the de facto standard in the industry and we become a platform leader.”
Cisco's virtualisation expertise is seen as crucial. "One of the major transitions that the industry's going through, probably started a couple of years ago, has to do with virtualisation and how virtualisation is, in fact, changing the compute architecture," Warrior said. "We feel virtualisation is, in fact, an underpinning and the foundation for leading the industry to move to Cloud Computing.”
Gunning for Google, Microsoft and Zoho?
There's also no prospect of Cisco getting into business apps, such as those from Salesforce.com, but Cisco is thinking of taking on Microsoft, Google and Zoho in the office producivity stakes . This could take the form of a Web-based alternative that would allow business users to create documents they could draft and share through its WebEx meeting and collaboration service. "That is an interesting space,” said Cisco Senior Vice President Doug Dennerline. “On the app side, we're thinking about that, but we're not there today.”
Chief Executive John Chambers committed Cisco to continued expansion into new services, including a TelePresence product for homes in the next two years. "On the one hand, make no mistake about it, we will stay focused on our core competencies, switching and routing. You will see a constant flood of product capabilities and directions coming in these areas," Chambers said. "At the same time, we realise that the network has evolved."
During his keynote speech Chambers cited thirty new "market adjacencies" that the company intends to grow into, from video and sports and entertainment to digital signatures, Smart Grid, and the virtual data centre. “We’re going to move into 30 new market adjacencies, all of which will pile together if this market plays out the way we think it can,” he said, adding that only a year ago companies were just starting to evaluate Web 2.0 capabilities. “When you look today, almost every major enterprise I know of is suddenly saying: ‘I have to move in this area. It probably is going to be the next decade of productivity and I have to think about what that means in terms of my business models.’”
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