It has been a long winter for many of us. Nevertheless, the snow is finally melting and it’s an entirely new season for Qwest and Cisco.
Qwest has implemented the Cisco Unified Service Delivery (USD) solution across its CyberCenters. Qwest CyberCentersSM provide a highly-secure, reliable, scalable foundation for the delivery of state-of-the-art hosting for mission-critical enterprise application services.
Qwest VP of Product Management and National Network Services, Eric Bozich, talks about how
Cisco Unified Service Delivery brings new flexibility to cloud service delivery.
The Cisco USD solution helps Qwest optimize its CyberCenter network, application, compute and storage resources, while reducing capital, operating, real estate and energy costs. This creates new economies of scale for Qwest and attractive pay-per-use business models for their enterprise customers. The Cisco Unified Service Delivery is helping Qwest to change the game by bringing new levels of service agility to the cloud.
Have you ever tried to fit 10 lbs. of flour into an 8 lb. bag?
If you have a legacy Data Center and a growing business, that answer is probably yes. Maybe you’re figuring to force more hardware onto your already-full floor space. Maybe you’re wanting to wring every last watt from the circuits supporting your racks. Perhaps you’re seeking to slip in just a few more servers without overtaxing your cooling system.
Whatever flour you have, the obvious fix is to buy a bigger bag: add cooling infrastructure, add power systems, knock down a wall and add floor space. Unfortunately, those are expensive solutions – even a relatively small server environment can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars when you include both Facilities and IT costs.
Perhaps there’s another way, though – a way that 8 lbs. of flour can meet your 10 lbs. of need and you don’t need more flour or a bigger bag after all.
A Game changer occurs when something that is thought about enables competitive advantages that were previously unachievable. Ideas that level the playing field or outpace the competition don’t come along every day. The Cloud is considered a game changer for service providers (SPs) enterprise and consumer customers alike. It’s a solution offering mutual advantage to all participants. There are so many people writing about it that we’re almost all becoming cloud-weary.
But like every good idea, execution is the key. If the Cloud cannot be leveraged by businesses profitably then the scorecard doesn’t go positive - and in the case of service providers the scorecard is based on new revenue generating services, faster ways to get there, new levels of customer satisfaction, new ways to trim costs and new business opportunities.
For enterprises, using an SP or hybrid-Cloud approach offers new ways to cost reduce IT budgets and concentrate limited human capital on their core business offers. Mobile workers and teleworkers, can access resources at their fingertips while branch offices are linked to scalable, virtually unlimited resource pools via the network.
Cloud offers SMBs a way to compete head-to-head with Fortune 1000s using new pay-as-you-go (or a pay-as-you-grow) business models. Applications that were unaffordable are now available on-demand.
Cisco Unified Service Delivery is helping Service Providers change their game when it comes to the Cloud. Service providers need a flexible, dynamic solution that enables on-demand service delivery. They need to integrate pools of resources within, across and beyond the data center and Cisco USD is the industry’s most complete end-to-end solution. The ability to manage a cloud solution from the data center all the way to the end point while applying the right QoS and security and meeting numerous other parameters will be critical metrics for success.
CiscoLive London was an incredible trip and gosh it was only 30 days ago – our first little project out of that voyage is TechWiseTV85 our latest episode on Data Center technologies. Data Center Optimization: The Next Stage is now available for your viewing pleasure in our ‘still has that new website smell’ environment we affectionately call the CVC (Cisco Virtual Connection).
This show was another exercise in self-restraint as the DC team had brought out an amazing selection – if we were hoping that a global show would mean a smaller show…we were out of luck.
The Cloud Opportunity
With Cisco Partner Summit happening in New Orleans this week there has been a lot of important news with the announcement of the Cloud Partner Program that enables and encourages Cisco Partners to develop and deliver cloud services being at the top of the list. You can follow the action on the Cisco Channels Facebook page. This announcement might have you wondering what the size of the market for cloud services is and what Enterprise organizations are thinking as they consider the move to services from the cloud.
At Cisco we had these same questions as we were making investment decisions in the systems and solutions that enable organizations to build a cloud service delivery architecture. As a result the Cisco® Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG) conducted research that included interviews with enterprise IT decisions makers and key subject matter experts. The study showed that enterprises across many sectors are seriously considering cloud computing. Based on direct feedback from enterprise decision makers, Cisco IBSG estimates that close to 12 percent of enterprise workloads will run in the cloud by the end of 2013 and that this will yield a market for public-cloud services of approximately US$43 billion. Organizations have a few things to consider as they make this migration to the cloud.
