Dive Brief:
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Cisco announced it will officially kill its Intercloud Services public cloud infrastructure in March, The Register reports.
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Cisco's public cloud infrastructure is based on OpenStack's open-source software. The company said it will move Intercloud workloads to other infrastructure.
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Kip Compton, vice president of Cisco’s Cloud Platform and Services, wrote in a statement that the change is simply a strategy shift, and that Cisco has decided to pursue "Enterprise Hybrid Cloud and SP Network Function Virtualization" instead.
Dive Insight:
Cisco introduced Intercloud in 2014, promoting it as an easy way for companies to move workloads from private clouds to public clouds. But the platform never really caught on in the enterprise.
OpenStack Foundation Director Jonathan Bryce recently told ZDNet that the OpenStack project is "healthy and growing." But it’s tough not to question that health. In September 2015, HP announced it would kill it’s public cloud, which was also built on OpenStack. Rackspace also backed away from OpenStack earlier this year.
And last month, Hewlett Packard Enterprise laid off an undisclosed number of developers involved in the open source cloud computing project OpenStack, while Mirantis, another company key to the OpenStack project, recently laid off about 100 OpenStack developers, according to its co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer Boris Renski.
Alternatively, the moves could simply mean companies are further retreating from the ultra-competitive cloud market amidst tough competition from AWS and Microsoft.
