Cisco's announcement on Cisco Cloud Services "Introducing Cisco's Global Intercloud"  is the next step in our transformation towards being an end-to-end cloud platform and software function solutions vendor. This announcement underscores the importance of the Internet of Everything and network-centric SaaS application areas like collaboration to Cisco's strategy.  A key component of this strategy is the enablement of application centric performance and scale.

Cloud computing has rapidly matured in the market.  Many businesses have adopted private and public cloud strategies and deployed infrastructure and support systems. With this adoption, applications need to address a new set of performance capabilities.  These capabilities consist of an application centric marketplace, open source software development ecosystems, software defined platform, and application service orchestration control policies.

This diagram presents the application and presentation framework that integrates to the cloud platform. The integration components of importance for application centric performance are in the Application Infrastructure services, Services Framework, Content Management, and Business Services API. As an example, as a developer publishes code to production, the Application Infrastructure services will validate the Cassandra instances in the platform are available. As the service is being consumed, the APIC controller will validate the network latency, throughput, and services dependencies on all application services supporting the application. In this example, if the Cassandra instance fails, APIC will proactively re-route the traffic to the next Cassandra instance with the best performance required for the service.The figure below shows how the consumer contracts are abstracted from the services and service providers to enable application centric cloud performance.

Of critical importance to having application centric cloud performance is to have a cloud that enables and accelerates the needs of the application. Cisco Cloud Services is the first application centric cloud in the market. Cisco Cloud Services is an Openstack based cloud platform that supports not only the standard OpenStack APIs for Compute, Network, Storage, and Security, but also exposes application control and framework capabilities through our innovations in Application Centric Infrastructure* (ACI) fabric and APIs, UCS, and Cisco ONE. The ability for Cisco Cloud Services to integrate application control and enable application centric performance across multiple cloud deployment models is key to our strategy as described by Fabio Gori's blog this week "The Rise of the Intercloud "

These innovations enable better application performance and control around hyper-scale, transaction or latency performance, and security policies that Cisco is contributing back to the open source community to ensure there is no vendor lock-in with these capabilities.  This journey is just beginning and Cisco is here to transform your application performance as you continue on your cloud journey.

Stay tuned for additional blogs on Cisco Cloud Services in the following days covering "openeness and interoperability" on one hand, "security and compliance with data sovereignty laws" on the other hand.

For more information follow me also on Twitter @kenowens12

(*)  You may want to attend our ACI Announcement of an Open Approach
on Wednesday April 2nd Webcast at 1:00 pm PST
with Cisco SVP Soni Jiandani and CIO Rebecca Jacoby