Australia is 'world's Petri dish' for Cisco's billion-dollar cloud

Australia could be the most "vibrant" country in the world for Cisco's fledgling cloud solution, according to a senior exec.

The vendor has already revealed Telstra as the first InterCloud hosting partner, as well as a tie-up with Dimension Data, whose cloud operations are centred in Sydney following the BlueFire acquisition in 2011, under the leadership of Dimension Data Cloud Solutions CEO Steve Nola.

Visiting Sydney, Cisco's president, development and sales, Rob Lloyd, said Australia's importance goes deeper than just these two relationships.

Lloyd said that for Intercloud, "the Petri dish of the world will probably be Australia".

"Our Intercloud solution and ecosystem will probably be more vibrant in Australia than anywhere else in the world," said Lloyd. "It will be here first. It is going to be interesting to see it play out."

He said the reason for Australia's starring role was "because we have everyone here participating. You have a very vibrant Amazon, a very impactful Microsoft Azure cloud [and] we have a lot of successful private cloud deployments... private cloud is at the heart of what we see as the future vision on Intercloud."

Intercloud hinges on Cisco's application-centric infrastructure (ACI), which Lloyd called a response to software-defined networking.

"We have had very good customer feedback on the acceptance of the ACI policy controller, which begins shipping in the next 60 days.

"We have about 30 customers that have deployed or are in deployment and we expect to have hundreds of customers deploy this technology in the next six months, which is more customers than have deployed all the SDN controllers in the world in the past six years."

Lloyd explained that Dimension Data will progressively migrate its entire cloud to ACI architecture using Cisco Nexus 9000 switches and APIC controller.

Cisco will also OEM Dimension Data cloud services for mid-market partners to resell under the Cisco brand.

Cisco Australia managing director Ken Boal pointed to cloud bursting as a major benefit of Intercloud, calling bursting "the low-hanging fruit of Intercloud".

Cloud bursting is more relevant to enterprise customers, and Boal said for the commercial and midmarket sectors, the selling points of Intercloud would be disaster recovery, virtual desktop infrastructure, collaboration and security.

However, Boal stressed that by making cloud bursting easier, it could become more popular among smaller customers. "If burst capacity was there today and I could add 20-30 percent capacity with the click of a button, people would change their minds on burst capacity."

Lloyd also gave an update on the vendor's partnership with Telstra. "We entered into a commercial arrangement in January and are on track to deliver customer-facing services this fall.

"The idea from our perspective was that we could bring a set of cloud services we have already been developing at Cisco, because we already run a cloud – a WebEx cloud, a Meraki cloud, a security cloud – and we would help them accelerate the deployment of cloud services that are relevant to the marketplace.

"A working demonstration of the power of OpenStack is the progress we have made in 100 days, from commercial negotiations to deployment and a few customers already in test and trial of these deployments," said Lloyd.

Cisco revealed Intercloud at the Cisco Partner Summit in March, revealing it would invest US$1 billion into in the next two years to build its expanded cloud business.