Cisco’s Plan to Pull In Cloud Provider Data Center Customers

Cisco’s got a stronghold in enterprise data center networking. Its presence in cloud providers’ data centers, however, isn’t as large as Cisco would like it to be. During a tech talk today with Goldman Sachs, Cisco’s Ish Limkakeng, SVP, product management, data center networking group, discussed what the networking giant is doing to grow this segment of its business. The company classifies cloud provider customers in two segments: major public cloud providers and software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers, Limkakeng said. “With the public cloud space, we’ve been underexposed, and we view that as a big opportunity going forward,” he noted, adding that the SaaS provider space is a growing segment for Cisco as well. Looking at the hyperscaler market, Cisco has the technology to “fully compete in every part of any given public cloud providers’ network, whether it’s in the core of the network or the data center spine and leaf tier, all the way out to the edge and compute,” he said, pointing to the Cisco-Google partnership that took center stage at last week’s Cisco Live event. To boost its cloud-provider appeal, Cisco is changing its approach to how it works with these customers. “At the end of the day, they are doing things at scale that have never been done before,” Limkakeng said. “Ultimately it is a lot of hardcore engineering problem solving that has to happen. We’ve changed our engagement model to be more of a direct engineering conversation than a traditional sales and go-to-market and business-development exercise. That is how these cloud providers want to work with us.” Cloud providers also want open networking and automation, he added. To that end, “we have opened up the model with which they can consume the technology, whether it is our hardware independent of our software, our software independent of our hardware, co-development, or partnering loosely with third-party providers.”