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Cisco confirms it’s killing Intercloud public cloud in March 2017

126 points by mandeepj 10y ago

network1 10y ago
Does Cisco do anything innovative any more? Seems like a dinosaur that is trying to survive. Buying a bunch of acquisitions due to not being to innovate internally isn't a positive sign. Seems like they miss many market transitions. Probably explains their large yearly layoffs.
- chipperyman573 10y ago
  Cisco's networking hardware is still top of the line (albeit expensive). But yes you're right, other than their networking hardware they don't do all that much.
  - ra1n85 10y ago
    >Cisco's networking hardware is still top of the line It's really not though. The majority of their platforms are terribly under powered, and have very high costs per port. Their only compelling platform at the moment, the NCS, uses a chipset made by a third party.
    - user5994461 10y ago
      Are we talking datacenter or big company network or SMB gear?
- gaius 10y ago
  In a few years I expect people will just buy the kit directly from Huawei who makes it anyway, and be like, Cisco who?
  - kijiki 10y ago
    Huawei is an OEM like cisco. The ODMs that actually make most of the networking gear are Quanta, Accton, Celstica, Alpha Networks, and Delta Networks. If you want to buy "white box" switches from those ODMs, you can do so through outfits like Edge-core, QCT, and others.
- crozz 10y ago
  I remember them having some impressive demos of Telepresence and something called Cisco Spark (which probably is an acquesisiton like you said). You join a meeting on your phone, just like Lync(Skype) but if you walk into a meetingroom with video conference equipment it transfers to that.
  - wikibob 10y ago
    Cisco spark was a knee jerk reaction to Slack. It's a very poor knockoff (much worse than Microsoft teams).
    - crozz 10y ago
      You're probably right. I was mostly referring to the integration with the Teleprecence technology that you get if you have their super expensive video conference setup.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- atkbro 10y ago
  Cisco UCS is pretty neat https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/servers-unified-computing/index.html https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/servers-unified-compu...
adrianN 10y ago
I don't like the idea that the whole Internet is running on the servers of a single company. Can't we do something to increase the competition in the "cloud" area?
- jedmeyers 10y ago
  Azure and Google Cloud are kind of out there.
- DenisM 10y ago
  Amazon, Google, Microsoft at the top tier. Three is not too bad. The business is super capital-intensive: you need a lot of cash to pay the developers, and a lot of cash to build out infrastructure reaching both the economy of scale and geo distribution. Apple could you probably join in, if they put their minds to it.
  - chinathrow 10y ago
    > Three is not too bad. The internet was ment to be a fully decentralized system. If you think that only three players are not so bad, then I'd ask you to reconsider.
    - onion2k 10y ago
      The internet was designed to be a fault-tolerant network that can automatically cope with outages by rerouting traffic around them. That's all. There's nothing to say who should own or operate the system implied in the design.
      - gaius 10y ago
        Economic failure is still "a fault" if it takes systems offline with it, that other people are using. Not all faults are purely technological ones.
    - CalRobert 10y ago
      It still drives me crazy that ISP's tell you not to run a server - the whole damn point of the internet is that it's two way. Opening port 80 and hosting a website on a raspberry pi that my buddy around the world could see may not be how the next unicorn operates, but it just feels good in principle.
amerine 10y ago
I have a few old colleagues that are(were?) working on IaaS powered by OpenStack stuff at Cisco. I can only assume they were working on this. I hope they get to move onto other projects :-(
- perlgeek 10y ago
  If not, I'm sure there many companies building private cloud projects that would welcome OpenStack experts with open arms. (My employer would hire such folks too, but you'd have to be willing to move to Germany).
  - CalRobert 10y ago
    What's the talent pool like in Germany? I looked at moving to Germany for a while and it seemed pretty strong. I'm in Ireland now but the companies I've worked for have all had German representation in engineering.
- anacleto 10y ago
  It's a pity. CISCO has great engineering skill - it's lousy exec play that caused the problem.
  - yesplorer 10y ago
    how did you know it's lousy exec play that caused the problem? Amazon is heavy with their advertising and this have a huge mindshare with potential customers and even non-customers alike. No amount of extraordinary exec play would have changed that in favor of Cisco. Cisco was dedicating $1 Billion to the project, AWS made $2.5 billion in Q1 2016. Think of that for a second
    - gruturo 10y ago
      > Amazon is heavy with their advertising and this have a huge mindshare with potential customers and even non-customers alike. No amount of extraordinary exec play would have changed that in favor of Cisco. Actually - Amazon is now an established brand name even in the corporate/enterprise execs' minds, but Cisco used to be way more famous and trusted than Amazon until recently. They've never been the cheapest or first to market, but their stuff works well enough and their support is good, esp. if you have the patience to first go through the mostly useless level 1 and 2.
inopinatus 10y ago
There's a famous quote, usually* attributed to Thomas J. Watson: "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers". This is usually trotted out as an example of expert predictions proving spectularly false. But in a roundabout way the consolidation in the cloud sector is proving a truth at the heart of it. * wikipedia says there's no actual evidence that Watson himself said this.
- alltakendamned 10y ago
  We started by connecting multiple terminals to one computer. Then we moved on to the PC where 1 terminal was connected to one computer. Now we are in the age where 1 terminal is connected to many computers.
godmodus 10y ago
i didn't even know cisco had a cloud. i wouldn't say amazon claimed another victim but rather cisco failed at advertising its services. granted it'd been difficult, amazon already has a massive platform to advertise itself.
nepotism2016 10y ago
I work for a big corp working on openstack, given the rate of companies dropping openstack makes me think I should look to move on
- alex_hitchins 10y ago
  Have you looked into Apache CloudStack? I would be interested to hear your thoughts on it if you have given it an appraisal.
jlebrech 10y ago
saying "amazon claims another victim" is misleading, it's like saying the race leader in a Formula one race is responsible for one of it's rivals not finishing the race.
- geodel 10y ago
  Not really. It is most like big box store chain claimed mom-n-pop store, which is quite common.
  - Gigablah 10y ago
    I wouldn't call Cisco a mom-n-pop store...
    - csears 10y ago
      Agreed. More like Wal-Mart putting Sears out of business.
    - kinkrtyavimoodh 10y ago
      It IS a mom-n-pop store in front of Amazon as far as the 'cloud' is concerned.
flippyhead 10y ago
I didn't even know Cisco had a cloud.
- RubenSandwich 10y ago
  It's amazing how many cloud providers there are. Here is another one to add to your 'They have a cloud?' list. CenturyLink: https://www.ctl.io/ https://www.ctl.io/. Note: I am in no way affiliated with them; I just heard they had a cloud a month ago so they are the newest addition to my 'They have a cloud?' list.
aconz2 10y ago
Where does all the hardware go when one decides to shut down an operation that large? Can I buy it?
- mdrzn 10y ago
  That's a good question, but I think they resell it as a whole.
- csears 10y ago
  Cisco were not operating a public cloud, so there is no hardware to get rid of. Intercloud was a way for a network of smaller "Cisco Powered" cloud providers to interoperate and allow workload mobility to/from on-prem Cisco / OpenStack deployments.
zeveb 10y ago
How many other folks here had never even heard of Intercloud? I think that if I had heard of it, I'd have initially placed it as a middle-of-the-road choice. Cisco's no Amazon or Google, but it's also not a Microsoft[1], IBM or HP. It's certainly not an Oracle. [1] I'd only initially place Azure as bottom-of-the-stack; I've heard enough good things about it that in an actual greenfield cloud project I'd consider it a contender.
- bfung 10y ago
  Just to clarify, Oracle has a cloud too, not just a database product: https://cloud.oracle.com/home https://cloud.oracle.com/home I think Cisco's and Oracle's cloud are both not heard of before?
vkat 10y ago
There are still investments in the Openstack space and I work on one of them(Managed openstack deployments). Intercloud was previously EOL'd 4 months ago, this is just the formal announcement.

126 points by mandeepj 10y ago

Does Cisco do anything innovative any more? Seems like a dinosaur that is trying to survive. Buying a bunch of acquisitions due to not being to innovate internally isn't a positive sign. Seems like they miss many market transitions. Probably explains their large yearly layoffs.

chipperyman573 10y ago
Cisco's networking hardware is still top of the line (albeit expensive). But yes you're right, other than their networking hardware they don't do all that much.
- ra1n85 10y ago
  >Cisco's networking hardware is still top of the line It's really not though. The majority of their platforms are terribly under powered, and have very high costs per port. Their only compelling platform at the moment, the NCS, uses a chipset made by a third party.
  - user5994461 10y ago
    Are we talking datacenter or big company network or SMB gear?
gaius 10y ago
In a few years I expect people will just buy the kit directly from Huawei who makes it anyway, and be like, Cisco who?
- kijiki 10y ago
  Huawei is an OEM like cisco. The ODMs that actually make most of the networking gear are Quanta, Accton, Celstica, Alpha Networks, and Delta Networks. If you want to buy "white box" switches from those ODMs, you can do so through outfits like Edge-core, QCT, and others.
crozz 10y ago
I remember them having some impressive demos of Telepresence and something called Cisco Spark (which probably is an acquesisiton like you said). You join a meeting on your phone, just like Lync(Skype) but if you walk into a meetingroom with video conference equipment it transfers to that.
- wikibob 10y ago
  Cisco spark was a knee jerk reaction to Slack. It's a very poor knockoff (much worse than Microsoft teams).
  - crozz 10y ago
    You're probably right. I was mostly referring to the integration with the Teleprecence technology that you get if you have their super expensive video conference setup.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
atkbro 10y ago
Cisco UCS is pretty neat https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/servers-unified-computing/index.html https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/servers-unified-compu...

adrianN 10y ago

I don't like the idea that the whole Internet is running on the servers of a single company. Can't we do something to increase the competition in the "cloud" area?

jedmeyers 10y ago
Azure and Google Cloud are kind of out there.
DenisM 10y ago
Amazon, Google, Microsoft at the top tier. Three is not too bad. The business is super capital-intensive: you need a lot of cash to pay the developers, and a lot of cash to build out infrastructure reaching both the economy of scale and geo distribution. Apple could you probably join in, if they put their minds to it.
- chinathrow 10y ago
  > Three is not too bad. The internet was ment to be a fully decentralized system. If you think that only three players are not so bad, then I'd ask you to reconsider.
  - onion2k 10y ago
    The internet was designed to be a fault-tolerant network that can automatically cope with outages by rerouting traffic around them. That's all. There's nothing to say who should own or operate the system implied in the design.
    - gaius 10y ago
      Economic failure is still "a fault" if it takes systems offline with it, that other people are using. Not all faults are purely technological ones.
  - CalRobert 10y ago
    It still drives me crazy that ISP's tell you not to run a server - the whole damn point of the internet is that it's two way. Opening port 80 and hosting a website on a raspberry pi that my buddy around the world could see may not be how the next unicorn operates, but it just feels good in principle.

amerine 10y ago

I have a few old colleagues that are(were?) working on IaaS powered by OpenStack stuff at Cisco. I can only assume they were working on this. I hope they get to move onto other projects :-(

perlgeek 10y ago
If not, I'm sure there many companies building private cloud projects that would welcome OpenStack experts with open arms. (My employer would hire such folks too, but you'd have to be willing to move to Germany).
- CalRobert 10y ago
  What's the talent pool like in Germany? I looked at moving to Germany for a while and it seemed pretty strong. I'm in Ireland now but the companies I've worked for have all had German representation in engineering.
anacleto 10y ago
It's a pity. CISCO has great engineering skill - it's lousy exec play that caused the problem.
- yesplorer 10y ago
  how did you know it's lousy exec play that caused the problem? Amazon is heavy with their advertising and this have a huge mindshare with potential customers and even non-customers alike. No amount of extraordinary exec play would have changed that in favor of Cisco. Cisco was dedicating $1 Billion to the project, AWS made $2.5 billion in Q1 2016. Think of that for a second
  - gruturo 10y ago
    > Amazon is heavy with their advertising and this have a huge mindshare with potential customers and even non-customers alike. No amount of extraordinary exec play would have changed that in favor of Cisco. Actually - Amazon is now an established brand name even in the corporate/enterprise execs' minds, but Cisco used to be way more famous and trusted than Amazon until recently. They've never been the cheapest or first to market, but their stuff works well enough and their support is good, esp. if you have the patience to first go through the mostly useless level 1 and 2.

inopinatus 10y ago

There's a famous quote, usually* attributed to Thomas J. Watson: "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers". This is usually trotted out as an example of expert predictions proving spectularly false. But in a roundabout way the consolidation in the cloud sector is proving a truth at the heart of it. * wikipedia says there's no actual evidence that Watson himself said this.

alltakendamned 10y ago
We started by connecting multiple terminals to one computer. Then we moved on to the PC where 1 terminal was connected to one computer. Now we are in the age where 1 terminal is connected to many computers.

godmodus 10y ago

i didn't even know cisco had a cloud. i wouldn't say amazon claimed another victim but rather cisco failed at advertising its services. granted it'd been difficult, amazon already has a massive platform to advertise itself.

nepotism2016 10y ago

I work for a big corp working on openstack, given the rate of companies dropping openstack makes me think I should look to move on

alex_hitchins 10y ago
Have you looked into Apache CloudStack? I would be interested to hear your thoughts on it if you have given it an appraisal.

jlebrech 10y ago

saying "amazon claims another victim" is misleading, it's like saying the race leader in a Formula one race is responsible for one of it's rivals not finishing the race.

geodel 10y ago
Not really. It is most like big box store chain claimed mom-n-pop store, which is quite common.
- Gigablah 10y ago
  I wouldn't call Cisco a mom-n-pop store...
  - csears 10y ago
    Agreed. More like Wal-Mart putting Sears out of business.
  - kinkrtyavimoodh 10y ago
    It IS a mom-n-pop store in front of Amazon as far as the 'cloud' is concerned.

flippyhead 10y ago

I didn't even know Cisco had a cloud.

RubenSandwich 10y ago
It's amazing how many cloud providers there are. Here is another one to add to your 'They have a cloud?' list. CenturyLink: https://www.ctl.io/ https://www.ctl.io/. Note: I am in no way affiliated with them; I just heard they had a cloud a month ago so they are the newest addition to my 'They have a cloud?' list.

aconz2 10y ago

Where does all the hardware go when one decides to shut down an operation that large? Can I buy it?

mdrzn 10y ago
That's a good question, but I think they resell it as a whole.
csears 10y ago
Cisco were not operating a public cloud, so there is no hardware to get rid of. Intercloud was a way for a network of smaller "Cisco Powered" cloud providers to interoperate and allow workload mobility to/from on-prem Cisco / OpenStack deployments.

zeveb 10y ago

How many other folks here had never even heard of Intercloud? I think that if I had heard of it, I'd have initially placed it as a middle-of-the-road choice. Cisco's no Amazon or Google, but it's also not a Microsoft[1], IBM or HP. It's certainly not an Oracle. [1] I'd only initially place Azure as bottom-of-the-stack; I've heard enough good things about it that in an actual greenfield cloud project I'd consider it a contender.

bfung 10y ago
Just to clarify, Oracle has a cloud too, not just a database product: https://cloud.oracle.com/home https://cloud.oracle.com/home I think Cisco's and Oracle's cloud are both not heard of before?

vkat 10y ago

There are still investments in the Openstack space and I work on one of them(Managed openstack deployments). Intercloud was previously EOL'd 4 months ago, this is just the formal announcement.