Google and Cisco are joining forces in the latest partnership between tech giants in the fast-growing cloud computing market.
As part of the joint effort announced on Wednesday, Google will make available some of its most popular cloud technology, including Apigee, Istio and Kubernetes, to Cisco customers that still use on-premise servers for some or all of their computing. The offering, which Google and Cisco plan to sell together, is slated to reach some customers in the first half of 2018, with general availability in the second half of the year.
For many of the large companies that make up much of Cisco's customer base, eventual migration to the cloud has proven tantalizingly slow. Security has remained a common concern at scale, as has the cost of moving existing applications from in-house servers onto a third-party cloud offering like Google Cloud Platform. "There's a reason [customers] want to embrace the cloud, but actually doing that is difficult," says David Goeckeler, executive vice president of networking and security business at Cisco. "So this idea the world would just move to the cloud, it's just not reality."
Under the partnership with Google, Cisco customers midway through the migration to the cloud, or hesitant to make it at large scale, wouldn't have to decide between "either or," as Goeckeler puts it. Instead, they'd be able to access some of the benefits of a cloud architecture by using Google tools across both their on-premise and cloud environments. The tools available to bridge that gap will include Google's API platform Apigee, Google Container Engine, open-source Kubernetes container platform and Istio, a platform for deploying microservices Google launched as an open-source project with IBM and Lyft in May.
According to the partnership's champion at Google, senior vice president Urs Hölzle, bringing such tech to Cisco's environments will help Google demonstrate its belief that Kubernetes is "the best choice" for managing workflows across any environment. Google Cloud Platform and Cisco's servers have non-overlapping customer bases, Hölzle adds, meaning that both companies should see a benefit in a joint go-to market approach with their combined product. "We're coordinating at a deep level to ensure the environment we are offering will work for customers no matter where they are," Hölzle says.
From a strategic standpoint, Cisco will benefit if it can retain more customers in the years to come by supporting such a hybrid cloud approach. If the distinction between on-premise hardware and third party cloud providers becomes "abstracted away," a company won't have to make quite the same tough decisions about where to build applications or which existing ones to move. In turn, they'd be less likely to go cloud-only and leave Cisco. With the partnership, Cisco can "make the cloud now an extended part of the enterprise architecture more naturally," Goeckeler says.
Google, meanwhile, unlocks a potentially large new corporate customer base for Kubernetes and the tools it offers for working with containers. Along with its artificial intelligence and data tools such as BigQuery, Google's container ecosystem remains one of its major points of differentiation with other leading cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft. While Hölzle says that the partnership won't necessarily accelerate adoption of the cloud, as it makes on-premise setups more cloud-like and thus potentially more attractive, it would inevitably expose new companies to using Kubernetes at scale, which would in turn help Google's cloud division's long-term relevance and business prospects.
"In the end, to me, cloud is something that is a multiple-decade trend, something that will be around for a long time," says Hölzle. "And we strongly believe that the cloud that delivers the most value is the one that will win."
