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."