Cisco today announced it is partnering with 35 independent software vendors (ISVs) to accelerate the creation of innovative cloud services for the Intercloud — the globally connected network of clouds Cisco is building with its partners. This first wave of hand-picked ISVs will offer cloud services to help customers capture the multitude of opportunities created by the Internet of Everything (IoE).

The company also unveiled its latest hybrid cloud software innovations spanning new security capabilities, increased manageability across clouds and support for additional hypervisors. By enabling flexible workload placement and consistent network and security policies across public and private cloud environments, Cisco Intercloud Fabric is taking the complexity out of hybrid cloud.

By simplifying hybrid cloud, Cisco Intercloud Fabric is showing strong market momentum with more than 100 customers and 65 partners worldwide. At Cisco Live!, 10 Intercloud partners — Cirrity, Datalink, iland, Long View, Peak 10, Presidio, QTS, Quest, Sungard Availability Services and Virtustream — announced new hybrid cloud services built on Cisco Intercloud Fabric. Cisco also announced that KPIT Technologies, Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, and the Salvation Army are using Cisco Intercloud Fabric to implement a single operational model across dev/test, quality assurance and production environments.

Building Cloud Services for the Internet of Everything
To help businesses capture the cloud opportunities presented by IoE, Cisco is partnering with 35 ISVs across three key areas: next-generation developer platforms, big data and analytics, and IoE cloud services.

Cisco and its partners will offer next-generation cloud services to customers via the Cisco Intercloud Marketplace — a partner-centric global storefront for Intercloud-based applications and cloud services from Cisco and partners. Cisco plans to open the Intercloud Marketplace in fall of 2015.

  • Developer Platforms: Developers are making the transition from using the cloud for simple dev/test environments to developing and delivering production applications. Cisco is partnering with a range of commercial app/dev companies including Apprenda, Active State and Docker to make their cloud developer environments a part of the Intercloud. It is also expanding its participation in leading open source developer communities like Cloud Foundry, OpenShift and Kubernetes. To help developers to build container-based micro-services, Cisco is building an integrated toolset for continuous integration and deployment. By providing developers with access to the latest APIs and micro-services across all Cisco cloud, IoE and big data technologies delivered through the Intercloud, Cisco is extending its focus on embracing and enabling its developer community via its DevNet initiative.
  • Big Data and Analytics: As our customers embrace digitization, they are looking for ways to manage the explosion of data and provide real-time analytics across their infrastructure and applications. To address this need, Cisco is partnering with the leading providers of big data solutions including MapR, Hortonworks, Cloudera and the Apache Hadoop Community to provide a true hybrid implementation of Enterprise Big Data solutions. Working with these partners, Cisco will securely connect and extend its on-premise Hadoop solutions with Cisco Intercloud Services, providing customers identical policy, control, security and resiliency across their big data implementations. By enabling the cloud to be a natural extension of what many of our customers are already doing on-premise and delivering a truly integrated hybrid big data practice, enterprises will have virtually “unlimited scale” and flexibility to support the dynamic nature of their big data implementation.
  • Internet of Everything Cloud Services: Developer platforms coupled with powerful big data and analytics capabilities delivered through global cloud services have become the enabling framework for the IoE. As part of this framework, Cisco will be exposing APIs for the application developer that enables network control, performance and security to be delivered from the datacenter to the device — which is critical when you are connecting billions of things. Cisco will also be delivering critical IoE services like Data Virtualization, Energywise and the Cisco Services Exchange Platform via the Intercloud. With an open model around developer APIs and micro-services, developers and enterprises will have the ability to integrate these capabilities into their own services and applications.

The first wave of new Cisco Intercloud Marketplace application developers and service partners include: ActiveState, Apprenda, Basho, Chef, Citrix, CliQr, Cloud Enabled, CloudBerry Lab, Cloudera, Cloudify, CloudLink, Couchbase, CTERA, Datadog, Davra Networks, desktopsites, Druva, Egnyte, ElasticBox, F5 Networks, Hortonworks, Informatica, MapR, MongoDB, Moonwalk, Nirmata, Panzura, Pegasystems, Platfora, Sanovi, ScaleArc, Skytree, StoAmigo, Talisen Technologies and Zenoss.

Simplify the Hybrid Cloud with Cisco Intercloud Fabric
As businesses make plans to connect their private cloud to a public cloud, they are presented with a wealth of diverse public clouds to choose from. They’re also presented with a complex and heterogeneous environment of different infrastructures, hypervisors, user interfaces and security requirements.

Cisco believes that hybrid cloud is more than just a connection: businesses should always enjoy the benefits of choice and diversity. With Cisco Intercloud Fabric, businesses can maintain a single operational model across its hybrid cloud, enabling flexible workload placement and consistent network and security policies regardless of hypervisor or choice of cloud (private or public) and all from a single pane of glass.

With its latest release, Cisco Intercloud Fabric continues to simplify the hybrid cloud by expanding its “Any VM, Any Cloud” promise in three key areas: security, control and flexibility.

  • Security: Cisco Intercloud Fabric now extends its zone-based firewall services to support Microsoft Azure. Cisco Intercloud Fabric Firewall solves the problem of securing traffic between virtual machines without redirecting this traffic to the edge firewall for lookup by including a zone-based firewall, the Cisco Virtual Security Gateway (VSG). With VSG support in Cisco Intercloud Fabric, customers who use the VSG for the Cisco Nexus 1000V Series Switch in their enterprise data center can extend the same policies to the VSG instance in the public cloud. This allows them to have consistent firewall policies across their entire hybrid cloud infrastructure.
  • Control: Cisco is now extending its VM onboarding to support Amazon VPC. Cisco Intercloud Fabric is designed to make the onramp to hybrid cloud easier. Its VM onboarding capabilities allows businesses to easily extend management to VMs already deployed in a public cloud by identifying pre-existing target VMs and moving them under Intercloud Facric control.
  • Flexibility: Cisco Intercloud Fabric now supports OpenStack KVM and Microsoft Hyper-V. A business’ ability to choose the right cloud for the right workload should not be limited by the underlying infrastructure or in this case, the hypervisor. Business requirements do not care which hypervisor a public cloud uses. Operational models are better served if all public clouds are treated the same. With support for VMware vSphere, OpenStack KVM, and Microsoft Hyper-V, Cisco Intercloud Fabric now supports the vast majority of hypervisor deployments.

Cisco Intercloud Fabric simplifies the hybrid cloud by taking the complexity out of heterogeneous environments. The unique software now covers all major public clouds and the vast majority of hypervisor deployments.