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Another One Bites the Dust: Cisco Discontinues Its $1B Cloud Initiative as AWS, Azure and Others Expand (geekwire.com)
Cisco will abandon its InterCloud cloud-computing offering on March 31 and will move any InterCloud workloads to other, unnamed cloud providers, including "in some cases, public cloud." From a report on GeekWire: Cisco's pull-back from the cloud scene marks the latest example of smaller participants -- many of them hardware-makers -- bailing in the face of huge growth by Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, and to some extent by Google Cloud, IBM and other, smaller public-cloud services. Hewlett-Packard in 2015 abandoned its efforts to be a public-cloud company. Then, Hewlett-Packard Enterprises essentially shut down its much-ballyhooed Helion cloud offering earlier this year. VMware still offers its vCloud Air hybrid-cloud service, though it has agreed to partner with AWS, which it once viewed as its arch-rival for cloud workloads. "We do not expect any material customer issues as a result of this transition," Cisco said in response to a request for comment. "For the last several months, we have been evolving our cloud strategy and our service provider partners are aware of this."
This is precisely why I don't rely on the cloud exclusively. It could be any company on any day, and your data is just history. Poof! We simply can't rely on third parties for everything, it isn't realistic and it isn't smart. We need to be the arbiters of our own lives and affairs, not Facebook, Google, Uber, Amazon, Evernote, etc., ad infinitum.
Well there's your problem VMware, you really need a catchier name than that! Not sure who come up with the current but it is terrible.
Also "For the last several months, we have been evolving our cloud strategy and our service provider partners are aware of this.", I'm not sure it's "evolving" if your plan is to discontinue it. Extincting might be a better word (if that even is one).
Ok, whippersnapper (different 'grandpa' here). I'm not sure if 'amazing' to you means 'has useful functionality' or 'does things I'm too clueless to figure out', but let's go with the first one just for argument's sake.
The things that make AWS amazing are management tools and applications. It's nothing that can't and won't filter down to ownable equipment, if not by them than by a competitor.
See, there's this thing called economics. What you've got right now is Amazon and Microsoft basically becoming a cloud duopoly. When they finish, they'll become a rent seeking duopoly and start raising prices. A lot. Microsoft already does this when you renew Office365 subscriptions. People aren't going to like or put up with this permanently and, unlike with cable and ISPs, there's nothing stopping them from making choices.
Cloud is already not cheaper at any kind of permanent scale, and by that I mean I always need X resources all the time. Sure it helps in those very few and highly marketed edge cases where you have 10 servers and need 100 for a week or so, but most people's businesses don't work like that. It's also good for very small businesses that have nothing, at least as a starter set.
So on prem stuff will become more attractive again as it becomes more capable and easier to manage, or actual cloud competition will develop, or likely both. What will NOT happen is everybody uses Amazon and Azure for everything like the cloud snake oil peddlers keep predicting. We'll settle into a world where people use what's logical for them to use.