Data#3 to rein in clouds with Cisco

Data#3 has chosen Cisco’s Intelligent Automation for Cloud (CIAC) solution to help it respond to growing demand for more flexible and DIY cloud provisioning amongst Australian businesses.

It is one of the first Australian partners to sign with CIAC, which features self-service provisioning and control solutions for data centre automation and IT as a service, the components of which Cisco acquired last year when it bought network management company LineInsider in March and cloud transparancey specialist newScale in December.

The companies announced the agreement in San Diego, California yesterday as delegates arrived for Cisco’s annual global partner summit where the vendor is expected to outline its 12-month roadmap for the channel. 

Data#3’s head of managed services Pat Murphy said the company’s customers - a growing proportion of which were using managed services - wanted solutions they could quickly scale up and down themselves.

The trend was especially evident amongst its growing roster of clients in mining and other industries grappling with costly, complex and at times unpredictable projects. Such challenges were spurring mining companies to invest in ways to achieve greater levels of automation, including of IT functions.

One of the key drawcards for CIAC, Murphy said was its support for multiple vendors’ technologies and platforms, meaning Data#3 could use it across its various managed services and cloud services businesses, preserving its existing IT investments while enabling faster provision of IT resources for customers.

“It’s not a homogeneous solution; you don’t have to be using Cisco.”

Sara Adams, managing director of Cisco’s A/NZ partner business group, said Cisco’s strategy differed from its major competitors in that the vendor was entirely reliant on its partners to build cloud solutions.

“We [Cisco] will not build cloud solutions; we’ll enable our partners to do it.”

But with organisations increasingly charting their own journey to the cloud, flexible deployment is a key consideration for Cisco's partners.

“As each customer’s approach to cloud will be unique, it is critical that our partners can help chart a customer’s journey to the cloud that is flexible enough to be deployed on-premises or hosted in a data centre while being simple to deploy and operate,” Adams said.

She confirmed Cisco was in discussions with several Australian systems integrators with regard to deploying CIAC but provided no further details.

David Binning attended Cisco's 2012 partner summit as a guest of Cisco.