At Gartner's Symposium conference, Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers sees the networking giant delving deeper into cloud computing and helping to create the network infrastructure that will allow different types of clouds to work together and integrate. In his remarks, Chambers said cloud computing is another "evolution" of the Internet.
ORLANDO, Fla.-When
it comes to the future of cloud computing, CEOs John Chambers and Larry Ellison
have different visions of what this technology can do for enterprise computing.
While
Oracle's Ellison threw cold water on the cloud computing hype at the Oracle
OpenWorld conference in September,
Cisco's
Chambers embraced the concept of cloud computing at the Gartner Symposium/IT
Expo here. In addition to seeing a vital role for Cisco as cloud computing
develops, Chambers believe that the whole idea of cloud computing is just a
logical "evolution" of what people have come to expect from the Internet.
In its simplest terms,
cloud
computing allows customers to host their applications and other data on another
vendor's infrastructure, and then these customers can have access to the
applications through the Internet. At the same time, some companies, such as
Google
and Amazon, are building their own clouds for their own applications.
In Chambers' view, cloud computing networks will start to mesh together.
When that happens, Cisco plans to hold the software and hardware together
through its networking products and allow different clouds to integrate and
work together. In a way, this expands on
Chambers'
vision of more collaboration and use of Web 2.0 tools in the enterprise.
The cloud can also allow enterprises to develop and deliver software.
"The cloud will move from being largely proprietary, in one type of
approach, to clouds interfacing with clouds and then how do you manage it?"
said Chambers.
"You can't do this without a network, and you can't do it without
intelligence in the cloud as well as intelligence at the edge of the cloud,"
Chambers added. "This has to do with reasons of identity, reasons of security
and reasons of performance. When you go across these clouds, from the home
networks to mobile networks to fixed networks and into the enterprise networks,
that's what we do well, and you have to be able to do it in an architectural
and efficient way. We're very bullish on what clouds mean in the future."
While Cisco can benefit from its network as the bridge between different
cloud infrastructures, it can also help the company's SAAS (software as a
service) offering through WebEx or with other parts of the company that deal
with collaboration, such as
Jabber-Cisco's
recently acquired open-source instant messaging software.
To show how important applications such as WebEx are to Cisco, Chambers said
the company's own internal use has increased 2,500 percent since January. With
that, Chamber added that Cisco also plans to offer more services in the cloud
during the next several years.
"We will do the exact same thing in Web 2.0 as we did in routing and
switching," said Chambers.
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