Cisco, Google to Make Hybrid Cloud Platform Available by October 2018

ORLANDO, Fla.—In a business world roiled by such rapid changes as public clouds, mobility, distributed computing and the internet of things, the common denominator has become the network, according to Cisco Systems CEO Chuck Robbins. Because of that, the network will have to adapt to the changes and the rise of modern workloads like artificial intelligence and data analytics. “The network that we build, we will have to think about fundamentally differently,” Robbins said during his keynote address June 11 on the opening day of the Cisco Live 2018 show here. Networks are going to have to evolve into open, intelligent, software-defined platforms that can provide easy programmability and security and allow developers from inside and outside the company to build software on top of them, the CEO said. To help the company keep up, Cisco officials under Robbins’ leadership also have aggressively remade the network technology vendor, changing it from simply being a box maker to more of a software company that is growing the revenues it derives from subscriptions and services. In an address that was short on product news and more focused on strategy, Robbins touched on the need for networks to offer a seamless link between a customer’s data center and the multiple public clouds they use while providing security in both on-premises and cloud environment and inviting developers onto the platform.