Evolving the Data Center to the Private Cloud

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According to what Cisco is seeing in the market, the transition to private clouds starts with consolidation of systems and applications to reduce costs, followed by a targeted virtualization strategy.

Cisco sees this as a step to making their customers’ businesses more aligned to line-of-business strategies and goals.  The final step is automation, which is the transformation of IT into a foundation for business strategies and future growth.

The following Cisco presentation has several interesting insights into how they are working with their clients to transition from data centers to private clouds.  Results customers are achieving are provided throughout the slide deck, which provide a glimpse into the cost, time, and strategy savings from moving to private cloud architecture.

Cisco treads a fine line between showing a private cloud architecture that is entirely proprietary (like Oracle) and educating the market on how they see private clouds evolving.  They do this by showing how commitment their product strategies are to open integration standards and how critical they see aligning to business strategies first.  The net result is a useful 38-page presentation that is worth checking out, to see how they view the progression of data centers to private clouds occurring in the years to come.

Note: I’m not working for Cisco and they did not pay me to write this.

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