By Petroc Wilton, Communications Day

Cisco sees virtualisation underpinning a major move to the cloud over the next few years and is locking in a strategy for extending the role of the network in the transition. CommsDay attended an international roundtable, led by CTO Padmasree Warrior and software group SVP Doug Dennerline via multi-point videoconference, that outlined the network giant’s strategy for the cloud.

“Virtualisation is emerging as a disruption because it allows us to abstract, or separate away, the application and services from the underlying infrastructure, so that we can realise much more flexibility with respect to providing resources on demand – whether it’s computing services or other resources in the data centre,” said Warrior. “Along the same lines, we are seeing the emergence of cloud computing.”

The firm has identified four layers – software as a service, platforms as a service (software development frameworks delivered on a pay-as-you go model), infrastructure as a service (compute-on-demand), and underlying IT infrastructure – and will focus its efforts on three of the four.

“We do not want to be an infrastructure as a service provider, we want to enable other service providers in other companies to build this capability,” explained Warrior. “The key role and the roadmap that we are developing as a company is to help the evolution of the datacentre… to the much more virtualised datacentre that will enable cloud services in the future.”

Some of the applications that Cisco will integrate into its offering include hosted email and IM solutions from recently acquired firms PostPath and Jabber, plus collaboration from WebEx, acquired in 2007.

“We have very, very large unified communications partners from around the world… they’re very interested to build WebEx as part of this collaboration practice,” said Dennerline. “I think there’s a great opportunity to build practices around healthcare, education, government… we’re working to put the right package around those collaboration experiences, the integration of WebEx, telepresence and our UC portfolio.”

While the cloud may offer advantages in terms of flexibility and cost savings, Warrior also noted barriers to adoption: concerns around security, SLAs, and vendor lock-in that might inhibit interoperability. But she cast these as opportunities for Cisco to promote the network in context of the cloud.

“Those are the three key barriers; to solve that you need the network,” she said. “And that’s why we’re excited about it, because we see opportunistically a way for us to extend the role of the network into this! If you step back and look at all the different compute architectures, cloud is probably the most network-centric of all of them.”

This article was first published in Communications Day