Cisco plans to acquire Metacloud, a start-up with a unique OpenStack-as-a-Service model that delivers and remotely operates production-ready private clouds in a customer’s data center. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Metacloud, which is based in Pasadena, California, uses its software management platform to deploy and operate private clouds for global organizations. Metacloud OpenStack delivers a full public cloud experience, but in a private environment that could be the client's owndata center, a colocation facility, or one of the Metacloud hosting facilities. Remote dashboard capabilities are included.
Cisco said Metacloud’s OpenStack-based cloud platform will accelerate its own strategy to build the world's largest global Intercloud, a network of clouds, together with key partners to address customer requirements for a globally distributed, highly secure cloud platform capable of meeting the robust demands of the Internet of Everything. Cisco's Cloud Services architecture also uses OpenStack open source software for building private and public clouds.
“Cloud computing has dramatically changed the IT landscape. To enable greater business agility and lower costs, organizations are shifting from an on-premise IT structure to hybrid IT – a mix of private cloud, public cloud, and on-premise applications,” said Hilton Romanski, senior vice president, Cisco Corporate Development. “The resulting silos present a challenge to IT administrators, as choice, visibility, data sovereignty and protection in this world of many clouds requires an open platform. We believe Metacloud’s technology will play a critical role in enabling our customers to experience a seamless journey to a new world of many clouds, providing choice, flexibility, and data governance.”
Upon completion of the acquisition, Metacloud employees will join Cisco’s Cloud Infrastructure and Managed Services organization led by Faiyaz Shahpurwala, senior vice president.
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- Metacloud was founded by Sean Lynch (previously Sr. Vice President of Technology Operations at Ticketmaster Entertainment) and Steve Curry (who previously managed global storage operations at Yahoo!).
- In March 2014, Cisco announced plans to build "the world’s largest global Intercloud" – a network of clouds – together with a set of partners. The idea is to leverage a distributed network and security architecture designed for high-value application workloads, real-time analytics, “near infinite” scalability and full compliance with local data sovereignty laws. Cisco's open Intercloud promises APIs for rapid application development and a new enterprise-class portfolio of cloud IT services for businesses, service providers and resellers. It will support OpenStack and multiple hypervisors. It will also leverage Cisco's recently announced Application Centric Infrastructure. Cisco plans to invest over $1 billion to build its expanded cloud business over the next two years following a "partner-centric" business model. The Cisco Intercloud will be hosted across a global network of Cisco data centers and partner data centers. It will offer value-added application- and network-centric cloud services to accelerate the Internet of Everything.
- In May 2014, Cisco announced partnerships with Dimension Data (part of NTT, Sungard Availability Services and Telstra to extend its vision of the Intercloud. The partners will align their public cloud infrastructure to the Cisco Cloud architecture and deliver Cisco Cloud services to customers and resellers. Cisco's open Intercloud allows local hosting and local provider options that enable data sovereignty. The hybrid cloud capabilities that differentiate the Cisco Cloud are built upon the Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) and Cisco Intercloud Fabric technologies.
