Enterprises have taken on many cloud computing opportunities but for the most part the adoption of applications on the cloud is very early and mostly for new applications and for development and test use cases.  Many  enterprise applications have not been considered for cloud due to their legacy deployment models or application architecture.

Many companies have made the mistake of thinking that legacy enterprise virtualization technology, enterprise  software methodology, enterprise provisioning systems, and enterprise management systems will survive their company's business transformation.  Unfortunately time and time again these systems are not able to scale, adapt quickly enough for the business, and frequently cost up to 10 times more than open source based  solutions.

The reason for this lies in the power of community and the scalability of software propose-built for scale and adaptability.  OpenStack definitely fits this requirement and has finally matured enough to be a force in the  transformation of your enterprise business.  Cisco announced the largest global Intercloud, which is based on OpenStack and other open source software to deliver a cloud that can scale to 100s of thousands of virtual  instances and 100s of instances provisioned in minutes.

As important as that is for cloud scale, interoperability, and adaptability, the message in this announcement is   much bigger.  Cisco is committed to OpenStack and open source projects and is taking the lead in developing  and driving software defined network, network function virtualization, application policy control, cloud  optimized computing, security, orchestration, and service assurance innovations back to the open source  community . Cisco's contribution focus is operationalizing Openstack for the enterprise scale, reliability, networking, and compute scheduling needs. In Havana, Cisco contributions included the Neutron Cisco plugin framework, feature additions to the Nexus plugin for physical Cisco Nexus switches, introduction of the new Cisco Nexus 1000v virtual switch plugin, and actively leading and participating in the design of the Neutron Modular Layer 2 plugin framework. Cisco's contribution in these and other areas, such as Layer 3, Firewall and VPN network services including yesterday's announcement highlighting additional IETF contributions Cisco  introduced with the OpFlex protocol for application centric infrastructure (ACI) .

Join us as we transform the cloud from legacy virtualization technology and custom code that does not scale to  an agile cloud platform that scales and adapts at the speed your business requires.  All supported by an international community of architects, engineers, and developers with your enterprise business interest in mind. Lastly, designed from the bottom up to interoperate with the most popular clouds on the market today while future-proofed via the abstractions in our software innovations.  Cisco is committed to this approach because we believe that a world of many clouds requires openness and interoperability to allow you maximize your  business benefit.  Let's see what we can accomplish together.

You may want also read a previous blog
What makes Cisco Cloud Services Application centric ?

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