Cisco Looks To Take Intercloud 'Mainstream'

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Cisco Systems is clearly undergoing major changes this summer, and Vice President Peder Ulander told CRNtv that the company’s cloud strategy, particularly around the channel, is transforming as well.

’The key thing is, we’ve kind of gone from an incubation project inside of Cisco into one that’s more mainstream,’ Ulander said.

After a ’controlled first implementation’ of Intercloud, Ulander said, ’it’s time to put us in the larger Cisco machine.’

’We’re committed to continuing down that path of having a partner-led initiative around Intercloud,’ he said.

Evidence around that commitment will likely come through Cisco’s new channel chief, Wendy Bahr. Ulander said he has already had extensive meetings with Bahr to figure out how to help partners take cloud implementations from Powerpoint presentations to sales on the street.

In Ulander’s keynote at The Channel Company’s XChange 2015 conference this week, he cited a Gartner statistic that 95 percent of enterprise cloud deployments fail. With that number in mind, Ulander told CRNtv that he and Bahr are focused on more than selling solutions.

’We’re actually building a cloud practice with our partner organization,’ he said, highlighting the importance of solution providers’ roles in cloud deployment.

PUBLISHED AUG. 10, 2015