Aussie Intercloud push: Data#3, Infront and Ethan join

Data#3, Infront and Ethan Group are among a group of 30 partners around the world to join Cisco’s multibillion-dollar Intercloud platform.

They join Telstra and Dimension Data, which became Australian Intercloud partners earlier this year. 

Data#3 only signed up to be an Intercloud partner last week, and the details are still being finalised, said a company spokesperson.

CRN spoke to Ethan Group executive director Tony Geagea, who had just returned to Australia after signing off the Intercloud deal. He describes the platform as a “fantastic initiative" that would "set Cisco apart from other manufacturers and providers".

“From the corporate, enterprise and government perspective, I see it as very significant. I don't believe there is one true private and public cloud provider that addresses all of the concerns that our customers face and that has a global reach.

"There are providers in this country – that's why we exist – but there's no one provider that has the global reach that is a suitable option that addresses the real concerns: the business issues around data sovereignty, proper resiliency, enterprise-grade and transparency around infrastructure."

Geagea said that being part of Intercloud would allow Ethan's enterprise customers to "flexibly and freely move workloads and interoperate with our private environment, which we invested over $40 million building".

Canberra-based Infront is testing code internally, said managing director Allan King, describing Intercloud as a “very exciting platform”.

He told CRN the company is developing a governance framework that will allow a customers to have access to many services providers from an aggregated point of view. 

Unlike Infront, Telstra has built its own Cisco Cloud Services (CCS) public cloud offering, which recently went live in trial mode for selected customers. Executive director of cloud Erez Yarkoni told CRN: “We extended to them space in our data centre to basically build an actual web scale cloud they are building globally - an instance of it here. That's the CCS, which is an Openstack-based cloud.”

Telstra has also extended its Intercloud platform to Singapore and Hong Kong. Yarkoni said that as well as giving customers more choice when it comes to their cloud platform, it will make it easer for customers expanding offshore to redeploy solutions. 

Dimension Data is in the privileged position of having Cisco take its cloud platform to the networking giant's partner community, said general manager of Dimension Data Australia’s Data Centre business unit, Peter Prowse.

“In simple terms it is giving us a much broader market and much more leverage to take our extensive portfolio to market through Cisco and other organisations,”  he said

Cisco announced this week that the Intercloud now encompasses 250 new data centres in 50 countries.

Equinix is another new partner. Cisco announced it will deploy Intercloud capabilities in 16 Equinix markets, including Asia. Equinix will deploy Cisco technology in its Cloud Exchange.

The networking giant also revealed that US$1 billion has been “earmarked” for financing to be offered by Cisco Capital to customers and partners moving to Cisco clouds.

Equinix is already a key partner of public cloud leader Amazon Web Services, with AWS understood to be the largest public cloud provider hosted at Equinix Sydney. Unlike AWS, Cisco's Intercloud is based on the OpenStack standard, so Equinix's tie-up could be interpreted as a bet both ways.

Cisco president of development and sales Rob Lloyd this week likened Cisco’s cloud strategy to the vendor’s involvement in networking decades ago. 

“As we look ahead to the next 30 years at Cisco, we’ll look back on today as a milestone almost as significant as that day in 1984 when our founders helped two network islands talk to each other,” Lloyd wrote in a blog post.