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Cisco to kill its Intercloud public cloud on March 31, 2017

Snuffing OpenStack cloud means it's all hybrid cloud and network function virtualisation from now on at Switchzilla

Cisco will turn off its Intercloud Services (CIS) public cloud next year, The Register understands.

We have sighted a message from veep for Cloud Platform and Services Kip Compton, which CCs a number of Cisco marketing and communications people, announcing the service's termination.

Compton says: “Today we are taking an important step to better align our resources so that we are well positioned to execute on Cisco’s Cloud Strategy. Effective March 31, 2017, the CIS multi-tenant hosting platform will be shut down and all tenants fully migrated to other platforms.”

Cisco launched Intercloud back in September 2014, billing it as an OpenStack-based platform enabling the easy shuttling of workloads between data centres and opining that the platform was a grand way to move its own and partners' businesses to subscription services.

That vision's clearly proven rather harder to realise than hoped, because Compton's letter says Cisco has now decided to pursue “Enterprise Hybrid Cloud and SP Network Function Virtualization.”

“All of our efforts need to align to advance that strategy so that we can deliver competitive offers to our customers in these critical spaces," the missive continues. "As we evaluated our resources and alignment, it became clear that continued investment in the CIS platform does not help us execute on Cisco’s Cloud strategy.”

Cisco has previously signalled its intention to downplay Intercloud in favour of hybrid services, but has not indicated the platform would be terminated.

Compton says the decision “is not in any way a reflection on the efforts of our organization” but instead a strategic decision.

Users of the platform “will be informed of the plan to shut down the CIS platform tomorrow.” [Probably Tuesday, US time – ed.]

Compton goes on to say “our focus now needs to be on successfully transitioning off the platform all those tenants while ensuring we provide reliable availability and performance until the last tenant has successfully migrated. We will work closely with all tenants to assure that they progress in their migration to other platforms, and we will assist them where needed.

“I understand that this is a difficult time of year to be sharing news that will certainly have a big impact on our CIS tenants as well as our own team. I remain committed to this level of transparency.”

The Register understands that service providers who adopted the platform may be able to keep the CIS alive beyond the March 31 end-of-life date. Other third parties who implemented CIS and run it independently of Cisco may also be granted a stay of execution.

People familiar with Intercloud tell The Register it was not numbered among the better-engineered public clouds on the planet.

OpenStack public clouds have an unhappy history: Rackspace felt it could build a business on the platform, but has since changed tack. HP pulled out of its own Helion public cloud. If Cisco is indeed changing direction, the OpenStack Board has some interesting matters to ponder. ®

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