Cisco confirms it’s killing Intercloud public cloud in March 2017

Cisco has confirmed that it will stop offering its Cisco Intercloud Services public cloud infrastructure in March 2017. Cisco will move workloads to other infrastructure, “including in some cases public cloud,” a spokesperson told VentureBeat in an email. The spokesperson would not specify which public clouds will be taking the additional workloads. The Register reported the decision earlier today.

Cisco first introduced Intercloud in 2014, emphasizing partnerships with cloud providers and the ability to move workloads from cloud to cloud. In October, Cisco announced a timeline for the end of life for its Intercloud software, which organizations could use to move workloads from private clouds to public clouds. Cisco’s Intercloud Services Platform is different — it includes computing, storage, and networking services that bear a resemblance to what you can find from the top public cloud infrastructure providers, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

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On the compute side, there are virtual machine (VM) instances optimized for general-purpose workloads, as well as instances optimized for compute, memory, and storage, with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), CentOS, Ubuntu, Fedora, and Windows operating system (OS) options available, atop Cisco UCS servers running Intel Xeon chips. Cisco also offers block and object storage.

Intercloud Services is based on the OpenStack open-source cloud software, like the public cloud that HP launched and then killed. Dell mulled launching an OpenStack-based cloud but backed away form the plans. Rackspace, which helped develop OpenStack, decided to stop providing commodity cloud services based on OpenStack and pivot toward managed cloud in 2014. So Cisco’s choice is not unprecedented. What it is another indication of is the power of the biggest cloud providers, particularly AWS.

But Cisco remains dominant in data center networking hardware, even as Facebook and others push alternative products.

Here’s Cisco’s statement on killing Intercloud Services:

Cisco has internally communicated that we are discontinuing one of our internal cloud platforms and will be transitioning affected workloads onto other platforms. We do not expect any material customer issues as a result of this transition. For the last several months we have been evolving our cloud strategy and our service provider partners are aware of this.

Cisco continually re-evaluates its technology strategy as customers’ needs evolve. The cloud market has shifted considerably in the last two years, and many of our customers are asking Cisco to help them develop cloud strategies that will help drive their digital transformations. With the global availability of cloud offerings, the trend toward rapid application development with microservices, and the ability to orchestrate workloads across private and public clouds, Cisco has evolved its cloud strategy from federating clouds to helping customers build and manage hybrid IT environments. Our cloud strategy centers on building and delivering secure hybrid cloud infrastructure, platforms, and services — with our partners — that offer customers the freedom to choose the best environments and consumption models for their traditional and new cloud-native applications.