Cisco Announces Cloud Milestones, Relationships and Executive Appointments

By TC Doyle

Two months after surprising the industry with plans to build the world’s largest “Intercloud,” Cisco introduced new partners, service offerings and executive appointments dedicated to helping it achieve its goal.

From the halls of the Cisco Live! event underway this week in San Francisco, Cisco announced new or enhanced partnerships with Dimension Data, Sungard Availability Services, VCE, NetApp, Accenture, Johnson Controls and the University of British Columbia.

The announcements underscore the fluidity of emerging cloud go-to-market strategies, which re-define the roles of vendors, providers and developers. In some of these collaborations, Cisco is levering the technology and services capabilities developed by partners, while in other relationships the reverse is true.

This week, for example, Dimension Data and Sungard Availability Services (Sungard AS) officially joined Telstra as “Cisco Intercloud partners” who will work with Cisco to mesh their public cloud infrastructures with Cisco Cloud architecture.

Cisco will use Dimension Data’s Managed Cloud Platform and SaaS solutions to deliver a suite of midmarket-centric cloud services to its customers and resellers, said the company. In addition, Dimension Data and Cisco will partner to deliver an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) solution that will be packaged with Cisco technology and software-as-a-services (SaaS) applications, including Microsoft SQL Server and SharePoint.

VCE and NetApp, meanwhile, have agreed to collaborate with Cisco to build “Intercloud-ready” infrastructure solutions, while Johnson Controls announced it will help Cisco Cloud partners and customers leverage its “modular” solutions technology to help reduce the time it takes to build data-center facilities.

As for Accenture, it has licensed Cisco’s “Intelligent Automation for Cloud” software to expand the cloud management and orchestration capabilities of the Accenture Cloud Platform.

In addition to these announcements, Cisco said Tuesday that more than 175 partners, including CDW and GTRI, have been certified to manage and resell Cisco Cloud services.

Finally, the Silicon Valley company, which has enjoyed a stock boost since reporting better-than-expected earnings on May 14, announced the appointment of several leaders to oversee key “cloud” roles at the company.

Longtime services executive Nick Earle will lead the Cloud and Managed Services organization, reporting to Senior Vice President of Services Edzard Overbeek. Gee Rittenhouse, meanwhile, has been tapped to oversee the new Cloud and Virtualization Group. In addition, Senior Vice President Edison Peres, Cisco’s longtime head of worldwide channels, is moving into a new role as head of the Cloud and Managed Services partner organization.