Is your organization looking to build a cloud?

You'll want to learn how Cisco's John Manville leveraged an internal, private, infrastructure-as-a-service cloud to drive business value.

John Manville is responsible for Cisco's Global IT infrastructure  -which includes the data centers,  networks, platforms and more. Overall, John's role is to implement Fast IT, which is really about being adaptable and responsive to business needs.

What technology helps drive this responsiveness and adaptability? "There are many solutions that can help, but if I had to sum it up in one word, that word is  cloud" replied John .

Cisco uses internal cloud technology for several important business imperatives. Through the cloud, we are  balancing internal IT workloads and providing our engineering team the tools needed for OS development. We are also using the internal cloud for external capabilities. For example, Cisco Smart Services uses our internal cloud to offer services to external customers.

Recently, John had the chance to participate in a new Cloud Insights Video Podcast to discuss the challenges his team faced prior to cloud implementation. Like most IT teams, they were challenged by speed of delivery of business capabilities, driving Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)  down and completing maintenance on the underlying infrastructure with minimal impact on the business users or applications they need on a daily basis.

To offset these challenges, his team  developed and deployed CITEIS (Cisco IT Elastic Infrastructure Services), an internal, private, infrastructure-as-a-service cloud. CITEIS started off as a way to provision virtual machines, but the team quickly realized that it  wasn't enough so they  added on more middleware and database capabilities . Now, it's a rich service that John's team  offers to their clients.

Through this process, Cisco has achieved many  benefits of cloud. To IT and business leaders looking to build a cloud, John  offers these three considerations:

1) Focus on the end user experience.Improving the end-user experience is one of the most significant improvements we made through the implementation of CITEIS.

2) Identify ways to reduce TCO . Building a cloud gives you the ability to reduce TCO.  For example, Cisco has  driven down otheir  TCO by about 60%.

3) Use the cloud for application workload mobility and flexibility.Cloud provides the ability to move the workload around the data center, which is important now and will become even more important in the future.

VisitCloud Executive Perspectivesto get additional cloud insights for IT leaders and subscribe to the Cisco Cloud Insights video podcast channel on iTunes or via RSS.

Additional Cisco Cloud Insights videos can also be foundhere.

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Additional Resources:

Watch the Cisco Intercloud Workload Migration Webcast (available on demand)

Register for @CiscoLive May 18-22 2014 - San Francisco#CLUS:

Watch Cisco Live'sTechnology Business Vision keynote by Rob Lloyd on Tuesday, May 20 at 10:00 a.m. PDT.

Watch Cisco Live'sCloud Technology Trend Keynote -Aligning Your Strategy and Business for Cloud Successby Dr. Gee Rittenhouse and Faiyaz Shahpurwala on Tuesday, May 20 -1:30 p.m. PDT.

Register today for the Cisco Powered Cloud Day at Cisco Live on Monday, May 19. The insightful day will focus on opportunities and challenges that can be addressed with cloud.