In 1996, Cisco and HCL began working together by setting up an offshore development center in India. Over the past 24 years, we have strategically joined forces to bring to market a broad portfolio of products and services that we deliver to more than 100 shared customers, encompassing data center, networks, collaboration, IoT, security, and application monitoring. We continue to invest in resource development through training, centers of excellence, labs, joint go-to-market activities, and collaborating as 360-degree partners developing Cisco products.

One of our joint development efforts created HCL VelocITy: A multicloud framework powered by Cisco. VelocITy goes beyond the world of software-defined solutions to offer a reusable, repeatable, reference architecture delivered with a consumable, flexible, commercial construct. This framework leverages components from Cisco and other ecosystem partners, along with HCL's position as a market leader in data center outsourcing and hybrid infrastructure managed services.

Many enterprises now operate multiple cloud environments, deploying a blend of private on-premises and public cloud infrastructures that best meet their application and business requirements. Executing a successful multicloud strategy can be extremely challenging, however.

A need to make multicloud easier

As enterprises start planning their multicloud environments, they need to answer a number of questions that can be crucial for achieving their digitization goals, such as:

• Do they have the required and adequately skilled resources in-house for the new technology landscape?
• Do they have a standard reference architecture that will apply across their on-premises and cloud environments?
• How will they secure the entire environment?
• What will be the cost impact of migrating to a multicloud environment? Do they have visibility into the potential cost differences when migrating workloads to the cloud?

In addition, once they've made key planning decisions, the process of execution can become a real nightmare. A customer with its own IT team may find it extremely difficult migrating to a multicloud environment due to the high level of complexity.

To help customers respond to these challenges, HCL built VelocITy. As you'll see, it offers substantial, measurable benefits.

Figure 1  The VelocITy multicloud architecture

 A pre-integrated, certified, multicloud reference architecture

The HCL VelocITy framework, as shown in Figure 1, provides a pre-integrated, certified reference architecture with pre-engineered components, incorporating the people, processes, and technology infrastructure required to provide end-to-end service delivery for multicloud deployments. Simply put, it removes the pain a customer can experience when migrating to a multicloud environment. They don't need to choose different products from different vendors and then attempt to integrate all into an optimal and secure solution that meets their specific use case needs.

The top six highly sought after use cases

Leveraging its experience helping many Fortune 500 customers design and implement their data center migration strategies, HCL has identified its top six validated use cases for multicloud. Aligned with major industry trends in deploying multicloud environments and summarized in Figure 2, these represent use cases that can be implemented with HCL VelocITy. These six use cases also expand to over 30 detailed use cases for day 0, day 1, and day 2.

Figure 2  Six validated multicloud use cases

Built on Cisco technology

In developing the VelocITy stack, HCL evaluated many potential technology partners. A clear success criterion was the potential partner's ability to deliver an end-to-end stack with flexible consumption model options, along with having a high level of ecosystem partner integrations and single-call, day 2 break/fix support.

Cisco met these requirements, leveraging its in-depth hardware and software product portfolio. In addition, many of Cisco's products are now offered through a flexible consumable model, leveraging the Cisco Capital?Open Pay? solution. A few of the Cisco products incorporated into the VelocITy stack include Cisco UCS?, HyperFlex?, Cisco ACI?, Cisco Intersight?,CiscoWorkload Optimization Manager, AppDynamics?, Cisco Container Platform, Cisco CloudCenter?, and Cisco Tetration Analytics?.

Adding to this list, Cisco has more than 65 integrated and certified ecosystem partner offerings available to fill out the VelocITy solution.

Migrate to a hybrid, multicloud environment with confidence

Cisco's market-leading technology, available through a modern OpEx-based business model, in combination with HCL's vast experience in multicloud deployments, brings to market a truly differentiated offering.

The numbers speak for themselves. For example, by deploying HCL VelocITy, both a large hospitality chain and a European telco reduced their TCO by 40 percent, while seeing a 50-60 percent improvement in IT automation.

If you're migrating to a multicloud environment to meet your specific use case needs, explore HCL VelocITy powered by Cisco.

For more information, watch this video from HCL:

To learn more about the Cisco and HCL partnership, please visit here.