Cisco announced Wednesday September 17th, 2014 that they are planning on acquiring Metacloud, a OpenStack-based private cloud-as-a-service company. This acquisition is in conjugation with their plan to create the world’s largest global Intercloud, a worldwide network of interconnected clouds and cloud service providers.
Metacloud provides IT teams a way to quicken their course to the cloud, as well as the Intercloud. By acquiring Metacloud, Cisco believes they will be able to advance their strategy and deliver value to customers right now. Metacloud already has the ability to deploy, operate and manage OpenStack-based production-ready private clouds in any data center. This acquisition will enable the creation of a hybrid cloud environment that combines service provider public cloud deployments with remotely-managed OpenStack private clouds.
The overall idea behind Cisco’s vision is to provide an OpenStack-based Intercloud that allows organizations and users to combine and move high-value workloads across both public and private clouds.
Cisco’s Intercloud has been met with excitement and support by both customers and partners. Many leading cloud and service providers are working with Cisco to get this project up and running such as Dimension Data, Johnson Controls, NetApp and more.