Networking giant Cisco will walk away from its billion dollar investment in the public cloud by the middle of next year.
Cisco will abandon its InterCloud and will move any InterCloud workloads to other, unnamed cloud providers. The move is being seen as a victory for Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and IBM.
HP saw the writing on the wall in 2015 and abandoned its efforts to be a public-cloud company. It shut down its much-hyped Helion cloud offering earlier this year. VMware still offers its vCloud Air hybrid-cloud service, though it has agreed to partner with AWS, which it once viewed as its rival.
Cisco said that it did not expect any material customer problems as a result of this move.
“For the last several months, we have been evolving our cloud strategy and our service provider partners are aware of this.”
Cisco launched InterCloud almost exactly two years ago. It anticipated spending $1 billion over the next two years building the offering, which it called “a network of clouds” and “a way to lower the total cost of cloud services ownership and pave the way for interoperable and highly secure public, private and hybrid clouds.” It was to be, Cisco said in March 2014, “the world’s largest global intercloud” and yet also “the first of its kind, delivering a new enterprise-class portfolio of cloud IT services.”
Cisco said it planned to build the product through partners, including Australian service provider Telstra; Canadian business communications provider Allstream; European cloud company Canopy; cloud services aggregator Ingram Micro Inc. and others. InterCloud would include platform and infrastructure as a service and Cisco’s collaboration, security and network management, and would be “architected for the Internet of Everything.”
In the end though it was sucking up resources like a Dyson in a tornado and at the same time customers were going elsewhere.
AWS’s share of the market for infrastructure and platform as a service as of June was over 30 percent, with year-over-year revenue growth of 53 percent, according to Synergy Research Group. Azure’s was over 10 percent, with revenue growth of 100 percent. IBM’s share was about 8 percent, Google Cloud’s was about 5 percent, and the remainder was collectively consumed by 12 or more companies.
