The Cisco Intercloud white paper outlines a vision for an interconnected cloud ecosystem that enhances hybrid cloud capabilities by addressing challenges such as workload portability, vendor lock-in, and global user experience. It emphasizes collaboration among technology providers, cloud providers, independent software vendors (ISVs), and developers to deliver scalable, compliant, and profitable cloud solutions. Cisco aims to unlock significant business value through this ecosystem, enabling organizations to access a diverse array of reliable services and applications while fostering global growth.

1. CISCO INTERCLOUD WHITE PAPER JANUARY 2015
How Cisco and Its Partners Are Extending the Value of
Cloud Technologies and Environments

2. CISCO INTERCLOUD WHITE PAPER JANUA RY 2015 © 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
IT teams are tasked with providing
infrastructure, applications, and services
to employees, partners, and customers.
This can be accomplished via private
or public cloud, each with its own
advantages and disadvantages. Private
clouds offer the ability to host business-
critical data and processes, but require
active management. Public clouds
offer on-demand use and low cost, but
require substantial relinquishment of
corporate control. Hybrid cloud, today’s
cloud model of choice, seeks to bridge
the divide between private and public
clouds. Yet the fragmentation among
various public, private, and hybrid clouds
remains, leading to challenges with:
• Workload portability. Workloads are
locked into the cloud fragments
in which they reside, because they
cannot be ported seamlessly to other
clouds.
• Vendor lock-in. Customers are locked
into cloud vendor platforms that may
not continue to provide the desired
pricing, services combination, or user
experience.
• A globally uniform user/customer
experience. A global firm may not be
able to ensure a uniform user/
customer experience because of
fragmented platforms, segregated
providers, and regional compliance
requirements.
• Service delivery. Cloud providers’
services cannot be delivered beyond
their regional footprint because of the
scarcity of mechanisms required to
collaboratively deliver the services
across regional boundaries in
revenue-sharing models with other
cloud providers.
• Application monetization.
Independent software vendors
(ISVs) and developers face limitations
on scaling their applications to
profitability.
In order to address these challenges,
we must extend the hybrid cloud model
(one private and one public) to many
clouds (any mix of private and public,
with any combination of platforms and
providers). In this extended model,
resources and services can be freely
developed and consumed across the
continuum of connected clouds. Global
business growth will be spurred by
unlocking a great deal of unrealized
business value for everyone. And
previously unforeseen levels of on-
demand resources, service scalability,
monetization, customer experience, and
policy compliance would be achievable
on a global scale.
This paper explores the idea and
outlines a vision for an Intercloud
ecosystem, its benefits, Cisco’s
leadership, and progress to date.
Introduction
We live in a world of many clouds, but they are still largely isolated. This has created fragmentation
surrounding the types of clouds (public, private, hybrid), hosting and management entities (corporate IT, cloud
providers, managed service providers), and platforms (Amazon AWS, Windows Azure, Google App Engine). It
has also resulted in user experiences and benefits that differ from one cloud to another.
Workload portability,
freedom from vendor
lock-in, and a global user
experience matter to
customers, while service
delivery and application
monetization have
implications for cloud
providers and software
developers.

3. CISCO INTERCLOUD WHITE PAPER JANUA RY 2015 © 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
The ecosystem would be somewhat
like airline alliances, where participating
airlines contribute complementary
geographic connections, seat capacity,
regional food offerings, and resource
pooling to offer code-shared flights that
achieve capacity utilization, diversity of
services, and increased profitability for
participants.
Cisco has been leading the development
of a similar ecosystem of Intercloud
partners, constituting cloud providers,
technology providers, ISVs, and
developers. Each plays a unique role in
the ecosystem:
• Technology providers would connect
clouds, enable service and application
acceleration, and develop technologies
for customer experience management.
• Cloud providers, like airlines, would
operate in their own geographic
footprint, but will leverage applications
and services offered by other cloud
provider partners and offer
complementary performance and
compliance SLAs.
• ISVs would make their applications
available to a broader array of
customers in a variety of consumption
models.
• Developers would leverage
application-centric technology
platforms, workload portability among
clouds, and open application
programming interfaces (APIs) to
develop new applications that will be
delivered by the ecosystem’s cloud
providers to global customers.
In essence, the ecosystem aims to
deliver capabilities that individual
participants cannot deliver on their own.
For example, consider a Canadian
multinational firm that wants to use
a single mobile sales app across its
regions, with centralized management
and a consistent user experience. With
workload portability, an ISV in India can
easily and efficiently partner with a firm
in South Korea to develop and test the
app across different kinds of clouds.
The app workload can then be deployed
and managed in an enterprise-grade
cloud by independent cloud providers
in Brazil, the United Kingdom, and
Australia, while maintaining compliance
with regional standards and optimizing
workloads. As a result, everyone
benefits. The IT department for the
Canadian multinational company will
deliver a competitive advantage for its
sales force. The software developers will
grow exponentially by scaling their apps
globally. And the cloud providers will
realize new monetization opportunities
and attract new customers.
Using another example, consider a
hospital patient in the Middle East in
need of a time-sensitive surgery that
requires real-time supervision from
expert doctors located in the United
States. The hospital in the Middle East
would need to securely share patient
information with a U.S. hospital system
across healthcare-grade clouds in
order to plan the surgery. The surgery
itself would require an SLA-backed,
low-latency, high-definition video link
between the hospitals for surgeon
collaboration across continents. In order
to make this possible, two regional cloud
providers from the Intercloud ecosystem
could collaborate to provide managed
telehealth services and leverage pre-
validated, surgery-assist applications—
optimized across clouds and across
networks—to deliver the desired medical
outcome.
The Intercloud Ecosystem
Built for the Internet of Everything
The Intercloud ecosystem will be truly built for the Internet of Everything (IoE). The ecosystem will be capable of delivering the right
services to address the value created by the multitude of connections among people, data, processes, and things on a global scale.
For more information, visit internetofeverything.cisco.com.
In order to integrate the fragmented world of many clouds, we need a symbiotic
Intercloud ecosystem, wherein each participant brings unique expertise, technologies,
services, applications, and regional knowledge to the table, and shares in the larger
business opportunities created.

4. CISCO INTERCLOUD WHITE PAPER JANUA RY 2015 © 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
The value unlocked by the ecosystem
would be much larger than the individual
contributions of the participants. As a
result, ecosystem customers as well as
all ecosystem contributors will benefit.
Customers, irrespective of the size of
the business, would have a wider array
of reliable services and applications
from which to choose, accelerating their
business ever further. The applications
will be available for easy consumption
via catalogs or marketplaces, with an
option for a single pane of management
across multiple cloud domains. Also,
customers will be able to choose
partners from the ecosystem of
providers and have the option to move
their workloads to desired clouds, thus
reducing their risk of vendor lock-in.
Specifically, for multinational firms, there
would be additional benefits of globally
uniform delivery of user and customer
experiences balanced with regionally
managed data sovereignty.
• Technology providers would enjoy
business growth by enabling
connectivity and application
acceleration across clouds.
• Cloud providers would benefit from
new monetization opportunities and
lower customer churns. There will
be unprecedented economies
of scale, opportunities for capacity
utilization, and ways to expand service
delivery.
• ISVs and developers would achieve
profitability faster. With a standardized
ecosystem ready to test and
scale their applications globally, ISVs
and developers would dramatically
accelerate time to revenue, as well as
time to profitability. Also, with open
APIs that optimize infrastructure
attributes, the ISVs would be in a
position to build differentiated,
high-performance applications.
Although it may take some time for
all the benefits to be evident, the
demonstrated advantages of the hybrid
cloud model have proven the value of
cloud connectivity. As result, a number
of technology partners and cloud
providers are coming together and the
Intercloud ecosystem is already taking
shape.
How Everyone Will Benefit

5. Accelerate Applications with
Cisco ACI
Applications that scale across
clouds require an approach that
spans clouds as well as the
networks that connect them. Cisco
ACI offers a holistic architecture
with centralized automation and
policy-driven application profiles,
and delivers software flexibility
with the scalability of hardware
performance. For more information,
visit cisco.com/go/aci.
CISCO INTERCLOUD WHITE PAPER JANUA RY 2015 © 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Cisco led such an initiative in the 1990s,
helping connect fragmented LANs into a
global “network of networks” that evolved
into what is now the Internet. Cisco is
now working to advance the Intercloud
ecosystem and connect countless
clouds around the world. The company’s
objective is to bring together the best
technology, services, applications, and
providers to deliver unprecedented
customer benefits.
The ecosystem is rapidly gaining
momentum in two ways:
1. Getting the right technology in place
2. Striking the right partnerships
The Right Technology
Cisco is leading the charge to put
the right technology in place for the
Intercloud ecosystem, with a focus on
connectivity among clouds, infrastructure
to accelerate application deployment,
adoption of open standards, and
deployment methodologies.
A critical element of Intercloud
advancement is Cisco Intercloud Fabric,
a software product that connects clouds
and allows workload portability across
clouds for any hypervisors and any
providers. It offers end-to-end security
with consistent policy enforcement
as well as unified management and
governance. Cisco Intercloud Fabric
enables choice, consistency, control, and
compliance across clouds.
Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure
(Cisco ACI™
) is also an essential
aspect of the Intercloud. Cisco ACI
fundamentally changes the way networks
are managed and the way they behave,
using predefined policies to automate
network provisioning. This creates a more
agile infrastructure that can dynamically
support diverse application needs across
diverse physical and virtual environments.
Through a policy-driven model, the
network can cater to the needs of each
application, and can do so across multiple
environments. Cisco ACI is entirely
centered on application requirements,
considering not only virtual machines, but
compute, storage, and network resources
as well as security, quality of service
(QoS), access control, compliance,
and automation policies. Cisco will be
providing open APIs that will be available
to ISVs to leverage Cisco ACI capabilities
for the development of new applications.
Cisco is also leveraging open standards
like OpenStack.1
Cisco and Red Hat
have partnered to simplify the process
of building cloud infrastructure using
the Cisco Unified Computing System™
(Cisco UCS®
) and Red Hat Enterprise
Linux OpenStack Platform.2
In addition,
Cisco has been an active contributor to
OpenStack projects like Neutron.
In conjunction with technology partners,
Cisco has developed modular Vblock and
FlexPod solutions that allow rapid and
modular deployment of infrastructures.3
Cisco Hybrid Cloud bundles offer
customers the ability to readily adopt the
hybrid cloud. These solutions provide
enterprise and mid-market customers
with a defined path to the Intercloud.
Also, Cisco has already announced plans
to offer Cisco Cloud Services with and
through Cisco partners.4
The Right Partnerships
Just like past Cisco initiatives, the
Intercloud ecosystem is partner driven.
Cloud provider partners will contribute with
their infrastructure footprint, geographic
reach, and customer expertise. Major
global companies like Telstra, Dimension
Data, Deutsche Telekom, BT, NTT Data,
and Equinix have already announced
plans to partner with Cisco, and Cisco is
aggressively recruiting partners to give
the Intercloud ecosystem a global reach.
Cisco’s large community of channel
partners is already engaged.
Finally, as the ecosystem develops critical
mass to provide a global platform for
application development and delivery,
Cisco will extend its outreach to ISV
and developer partners to enhance the
assortment of applications and services
offered. The partner offerings will
complement Cisco applications like Cisco
WebEx and provide customers with a
rich variety of applications and services
to choose from in multiple consumption
models.
The Ecosystem is Gaining Momentum
Connect Clouds with
Cisco Intercloud Fabric
Cisco®
Intercloud Fabric allows
secure workload portability across
heterogeneous clouds. For example,
it lets businesses extend their own
data centers to create a hybrid
cloud and allows providers to do the
same for their customers. For more
information, visit cisco.com/c/en/
us/products/switches/intercloud-
fabric/index.html.

6. Extending the connectivity of clouds
beyond the hybrid cloud to the
Intercloud promises unparalleled
opportunities for global business
acceleration, monetization, growth, and
services scalability. In order to realize
the opportunities, Cisco is leading the
development of an Intercloud ecosystem
in collaboration with technology
providers, cloud providers, ISVs, and
developers.
Critical technology components, such as
Cisco Intercloud Fabric for connecting
clouds and Cisco ACI for accelerating
application delivery, are already in place.
A variety of partners, including Telstra,
Dimension Data, Deutsche Telekom, and
BT are now collaborating and more are
joining every month. The ecosystem
is rapidly moving toward the vision of
delivering virtually unlimited resources,
applications, and services from partners
across the globe under a variety of
consumption models in a symbiotic
collaboration.
It is time for any business to be
Intercloud ready, and the Intercloud
ecosystem offers the ideal way for
differentiated technology providers,
service providers, ISVs, and developers
to leverage their competitive
differentiators for lasting growth.
For more information, please visit
www.cisco.com/go/cloud.
Conclusion
Extending the connectivity
of clouds beyond the
hybrid cloud to the
Intercloud promises
unparalleled opportunities
for global business
acceleration, monetization,
growth, and services
scalability.
Cisco and the Cisco Logo are trademarks of Cisco Systems, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. A listing of Cisco’s trademarks can be found at www.cisco.com/go/trademarks.
Third-party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word partner does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company. (1007R)
1
http://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/usa/products/collateral/switches/nexus-7000-series-switches/wp_openstack.pdf
2
http://newsroom.cisco.com/release/1486565/cisco-and-red-hat-deliver-integrated-infrastructure-for_3
3
http://newsroom.cisco.com/release/1494528/cisco-adds-over-30-intercloud-partners-including-deutsc_2
4
http://newsroom.cisco.com/release/1373639