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."

Comments

The bubble is popping

[guruevi]

It seems companies are finally realizing they've been over-saturating the market with cheap VPS and people are finally starting to realize the security and other implications of shared hosting at a handful of providers.

I don't know if Dyn's outage a few weeks ago finally got the managers to listen and start diversifying their systems again.

Re: The bubble is popping

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

now if they could just axe their servers.

[nimbius]

Its a little off topic but its got to be said. Servers that do every single conceivable out of band management thing in the world. I blame dell for this, but Cisco has taken it to a whole new level. Weve had IPMI and SOL over BMC for sixteen glorious years, and thats worked fine to ditch the console servers and the overpriced intelligent power wips in the datacenter. But cisco's UCM blade platform is a fever dream of browser based garbage designed to configure everything from the servers network IP and route, to inventory and asset management. im sure this is great if your datacenter is a single vendor, but in real datacenters there are about two dozen of these kinds of products in constant battle with eachother. Each has their own plugin, interface, configuration workflow and god help us configuration language. Ciscos UCM is a committee based piece of garbage.

in the real world this is nothing more than firmware-based bloatware. it frankly drives me away from buying from these vendors that cant just deliver the hardware as they always have without engaging in some value-added fart huffing contest to see who can create the biggest branded cockup. Vendors should take note that all this garbage just gets shut off and ignored in favour of IPMI and Salt/Chef/Ansible/a sensible configuration management solution that isnt tied like some rented mule to a multinational corporations committee based meth-addled future predicting marketing department.

Heavy clouds

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

"vCloud Air hybrid-cloud service"

[DarthVain]

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).

Re:"vCloud Air hybrid-cloud service"

[quetwo]

I guess the positive side of VMWare is that whey they pick a name, they usually only stick with it for about 6 months or so.

Damend if you do, damned if you don't

[Anonymous Coward]

Less about capability, more about lack of standards. IPMI works very well because it was an exceptionally specific standard, that encompassed the requisite functionality without wiggle room.. Just like SNMP mibs developed in the late 90s were nice and specific (and even then, Cisco ignored many of those in favor their proprietary mibs).

In this century, the vendors have taken back control of the newer so-called management 'standards' and make them all terrible. Netconf, CIM, Redfish, all terrible. They all prioritize the ability of the vendors to 'differentiate' to the point of making it useless for developing cross-vendor with a single set of code. So it empowers vendors to convince people they are writing to standards when in fact they are writing locked-in automation, Note that all these standards are comprised *entriely* of vendors, with no customer represenation.

On the flipside, OpenCompute *could* have been something to keep vendors in check. However, in practice only the extremely big companies get their way in designs that don't help the larger industry, and no two customers use the same standards limiting the upside for vendors to comply even if the designs were good.

This would be fine except for the fact that there is pressure to torpedo working standards like IPMI, because 'progress'.