In technology, there are no strange bedfellows. Even at the height of their cold war, Microsoft and Apple did not abhor each other, working together on tech projects that rewarded mutual benefits – a term that sometimes also includes surviving against disruptions. It is therefore no surprise that a partnership between Cisco and Google goes beyond helping customers with more efficiency in hybrid cloud environment.
It’s a win-win situation for the two Silicon Valley giants. Google wants to catch up to Amazon, and Cisco is facing a serious threat from cloud services (possibly an existential threat).
At one time, Cisco had trumped Microsoft to become world’s most valuable publicly traded company. It was Cisco whose networking hardware was used to build the internet. But today, companies that were once overly reliant on Cisco equipment are increasingly renting cloud services. Who won’t prefer the cloud after all, when you have AWS shielding you from all the heavy workloads in background!
Add to it the recent tie up between VMware and Amazon, and the future looked bleak. With its software defined data center approach, VMware posed a definite scare. To tell the truth, Cisco was running out of partners. Remember EMC was a key Cisco partner at one time, but today Dell Technologies owns it. The game is complicated.
Which is why Cisco and Google have joined forces. Both have pioneered different eras of internet, and promise to offer something different. With companies complaining about separate tools to manage on-premise software and those on cloud, the security problems definitely needed to be addressed.
Adding Cisco networking and security software over Google programming technology will greatly help companies manage software services that run in their own data centers or in facilities operated by external cloud services. It brings agility and security in a hybrid ecosystem.
Google will definitely benefit from Cisco’s long list of corporate customers – it being the elderly partner that has witnessed generations of change in IT. But the hurdle in beating Amazon is that it never slackens, and Google knows it has mountains to climb. Where it’s all cloudy at the peak.