Cisco extends Cloud partnership with Microsoft

To accelerate service delivery for cloud providers, Cisco has extended its cloud and data center relationship with Microsoft to include a new technology platform.

Aziz Benmalek, General Manager, Hosting Service Providers, Microsoft, said, “Today, we are expanding 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 have 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 the current market demand and rapidly-shifting customer needs.”

The Cisco Cloud Architecture for the Microsoft Cloud Platform will provide the building blocks for cloud providers to evolve beyond traditional Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings to create combined IaaS, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions that deliver more value to their customers.

The integration between Cisco and Microsoft technologies will aim to enable cloud providers to realize unprecedented value. This collaboration will deliver pre-packaged policy management libraries that allow cloud providers to implement applications more quickly with consistent policy management. In addition, Microsoft System Center 2012 R2 is integrated with the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) Manager to provide the operational simplicity and control that cloud providers need to manage their growing business.

Nick Earle, Senior Vice-President, Cloud and Managed Services, Cisco, said, “We want our service provider partners to move upmarket with us and offer higher-end cloud services. By partnering with Microsoft, we are 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.”

The new solution is primarily designed to meet the needs of traditional enterprise applications. It will complement Cisco’s OpenStack-based architectures for cloud native workloads and provide seamless hybrid cloud capability for connecting to Intercloud and Azure. Cisco plans to publish the first reference architecture in April 2015.

Additionally, 14 cloud providers have announced that they plan to join Cisco’s Intercloud partner ecosystem, bringing the number of Intercloud providers to more than 60 with a footprint of more than 350 data centers across 50 countries.