BOSTON—The cloud is a central pillar of Cisco’s overall business efforts, and one of the leading voices for the cloud at Cisco is Lew Tucker, vice president and CTO of cloud computing. Tucker also serves as the vice chairman of the OpenStack Foundation, helping to guide the open-source cloud platform forward.
In a video interview with eWEEK at the OpenStack Summit here, Tucker provides insight into where the cloud fits into Cisco’s overall business and why OpenStack matters.
Tucker said Cisco’s model around the cloud is about how to increasingly move services into the cloud. He is specifically focused on the cloud platform piece of the business, which involves OpenStack as well as container usage.
“OpenStack has really become the defacto IaaS [infrastructure-as-a-service] platform for NFV [network functions virtualization],” Tucker said.
Cisco’s products and services in the OpenStack cloud market have evolved over the years from a distribution model to now embracing new approaches like containers.
“A lot of customers that we’re dealing with are deploying OpenStack to manage their infrastructure, but now they’re managing virtual machines, containers and bare-metal,” Tucker said. “We want infrastructure to be automated and driven by software.”
Watch the full video interview with Lew Tucker above.