Chuck Robbins - CEO, Cisco
Cisco has announced a global partnership with Google Cloud, designed to help customers maximise investments through hybrid cloud solutions.
Terms of the alliance will see the creation of an offering that enables applications and services to be deployed, managed and secured across on-premises environments and the Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
Despite details still lacking at this stage, the project - internally labelled Goodzilla - will be joined together by Kubernetes and Istio technologies.
“Our partnership with Google gives our customers the very best cloud has to offer— agility and scale, coupled with enterprise-class security and support,” Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins said.
“We share a common vision of a hybrid cloud world that delivers the speed of innovation in an open and secure environment to bring the right solutions to our customers.”
According to Robbins, the offering provides enterprise customers with a way to "run, secure and monitor workloads", alongside a platform to develop new applications in the cloud or on-premises.
Specifically, the joint solution helps developers leverage managed Kubernetes, GCP Service Catalog, Cisco networking and security, and Istio authentication and service mesh monitoring.
In addition, enterprise app developers can securely access cloud APIs, and cloud developers can securely access enterprise APIs and on-premises resources.
“This joint solution from Google and Cisco facilitates an easy and incremental approach to tapping the benefits of the Cloud,” Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene added. “This is what we hear customers asking for.”
Furthermore, the hybrid solution is built to provide orchestration and management, networking and security capabilities for businesses through the cloud or Cisco-powered data centres, backed up with better visibility and control, service and API management plus support.
In support of this partnership, DevNet – Cisco's Developer Network – will also offer a set of tools for enterprise and Internet of Things (IoT) developers to explore open source technologies, build hybrid cloud solutions, and further develop IoT opportunities.
The Cisco DevNet Sandbox provides access to hardware and software developer environments at no cost.
Locally speaking, the partnership comes four months after Google launched its cloud platform in Australia, with Sydney becoming part of the nine regions, 27 zones and 100 points of presence comprising the global GCP footprint.
As reported by ARN, the move provides partners and end customers in Australia and New Zealand access to a range of locally-sourced GCP services.
“The GCP customers down under will see significant reductions in latency when they run their applications out of the Sydney region,” Google Cloud Asia Pacific and Japan managing director, Richard Harshman told ARN.
“Our performance testing shows 80-95 per cent reductions in round-trip time latency when service customers from New Zealand and Australian cities, such as Sydney, Auckland, Wellington, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide, compared to using the regions in Singapore and Taiwan,” he said.
From a Cisco standpoint, the partnership comes as the tech giant continues to pivot away from traditional markets, evident through through plans to acquire BroadSoft in an attempt to reinvent itself as a software and cloud vendor.
Expected to close during the first quarter of the calendar year 2018, the US$1.9 billion buy builds on six previous acquisitions during 2017, including application intelligence specialists AppDynamics in January.
