Cisco Teams Up With Google To Take On AWS

Legacy networking giant Cisco Systems has announced a hybrid cloud partnership with Google, with the two technology giants hoping that this alliance will help them compete against the dominance of AWS.

Amazon Web Services has been leading the cloud market for 10 or so years. And the Amazon backed company now controls about 34% of the market, and generates an impressive $4 billion in quarterly revenues.

According to this same research by Synergy Research Group, Google lags behind AWS, Microsoft Azure, as well as IBM, and is currently in fourth place with a 5% slice of the pie.

This new alliance, Google believes, will put its expertise in building massive datacenters and open source software, with the global sales force, customer support and security that Cisco offers. It will combine to help corporate customers more easily develop software for the cloud.

Legacy enterprise and other organizations like heavily regulated hospitals and banks have now begun to slowly transition to the cloud, leaving core data on premises.

Google and Cisco will target these customers with their hybrid cloud offering, organizations that are not yet ready to go all-in on the cloud.

Both companies plan to make their cloud offering available for early customers in the first half of 2018, and are looking to expand to the broader market in the second half of next year.

The two companies have been working together for the past year to developing software, and working with their corporate customers on requirements. The idea being for Google to sell more of its cloud computing services, while Cisco to move more of its hyperconverged products.

This certainly looks like a more direct approach, similar to how Cisco rival Dell Technologies partnered its Pivotal unit with corporate customers like General Electric.

It was only in March of 2017 that Cisco Systems hastily shut down its $1 billion public cloud unit, Intercloud Services, and bowed down out of the race to beat other cloud giants like Amazon Web Services and Salesforce.com.

However, this alliance with Google, definitely looks like a more thought out endeavor.