It is an exciting time in our industry. Technology is enabling new kinds of capabilities that are changing the fabric of IT. Converged infrastructure is one of those major paradigm shifts in the industry that is driving IT organizations to transform the way they do business, lowering operational costs and delivering capabilities that are enabling IT to get closer to the business, faster.
VCE developed its Vblock Systems to give customers the ability to deploy any application at any scale – simpler and faster than before – while leveraging the industry’s best technologies. The ironclad integration of innovative technologies from our investor companies, combined with a customer experience unmatched in the industry, has given VCE the market leadership position in converged infrastructure.
The incredible growth VCE has experienced over the last three years is equally distributed among enterprise and service provider customers. This balance of customers has given us an important perspective on opportunities emerging for both sectors. In no small part, we designed VCE Vblock Systems to give enterprise customers a fast and simple path to mission-critical private clouds. We applied a similar approach to our service provider partners, offering them a fast and simple path to operationalizing their provider cloud offerings.
Our service provider customers continuously evaluate ways to drive greater use of their cloud offerings. Concurrently, our enterprise customers are always looking at which application workloads will operate on-premise and which will move to a provider cloud. It is common for situations to arise where the application workload location may require variability based on business conditions. At one moment, an application may be best suited to operate in a provider cloud. But as business conditions change, that application may be better suited to operate on the customer premise, in the private cloud.
This variability – where a workload should reside based on business conditions – results in a customer need to dynamically move application workloads between provider and private clouds. In VCE’s 2013 “Unleash Simplicity” launch, we spoke of these requirements and how we were working to deliver this capability to our customers.
Today a key piece of this capability has been introduced by Cisco with the announcement of the Cisco InterCloud. The Cisco InterCloud provides the network foundation for secure hybrid clouds, enabling enterprises running Vblock Systems to securely connect to public, provider clouds. Enterprises are increasingly moving to architectures that enable greater agility, on-demand provisioning and elastic scalability through the extension of private clouds to externally hosted provider clouds.
The Cisco InterCloud, operating on Vblock Systems, is designed to bridge enterprise and cloud provider deployments in a secure and consistent manner. This capability brings new possibilities to our entire portfolio, enabling our service provider partners to now offer any size Vblock System in a secure, managed customer premise role with connected extension into their own provider clouds built on Vblock Systems. And our enterprise customers can now extend their remote and branch office Vblock System 100 and 200 as well as their core Vblock System 300 and 700 into provider clouds, utilizing Cisco InterCloud and Vblock Systems. This announcement is a key step in building the bridge between our enterprise and service provider customers, enabling each of them to benefit from the investments they are making in Vblock Systems.
As I said before, it is an exciting time in our industry – and we will continue to bring new investor technology as well as our own innovations to Vblock Systems, enabling customers to transform their IT operations.
