Google's Diane Greene To Cisco Partners: 'We Are Counting On All Of You'
Google Cloud leader Diane Greene took center stage alongside Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins at Cisco Partner Summit 2017 to tell the thousands of partners in attendance that the search giant will be depending on Cisco's channel to drive the new joint solution between the two companies unveiled last week.
"This is a huge opportunity [for partners]. We are counting on all of you. The customers, they need help with modernizing their applications," said Greene onstage at Cisco's Partner Summit in Dallas Texas this week. "Our success is completely tied to your success."
Cisco is teaming up with Google in a wide-ranging deal that provides the networking giant with a seamless bridge to next-generation public cloud technologies, including the Kubernetes container orchestration platform. The Cisco and Google Cloud hybrid cloud offering, which will become available in the second half of 2018, opens the door for developers to combine emerging Google Cloud services with Cisco on-premises networking, hyper-converged and security offerings.
"When you see somebody like Cisco and Google Cloud come together, it's a validation for us," said Vinu Thomas, chief technology officer at Presidio, a New York-based top Cisco partner, ranked No. 21 on CRN's 2017 Solution Provider 500 list.
"Customers are going to use a combination of SaaS, Infrastructure as-a-Service, private on-premise[s] data center, and then legacy mainframe – they're not going to go away from some legacy applications as quickly as we can," Thomas said.
Thomas said Presidio is already working with Cisco with its Microsoft Azure stacks. "We're going to be part of the Cisco – Google Cloud as well. For us, it gives us an opportunity to play in all these things, depending on what the customer wants," he said.
"We've been actually talking to you for over a year, which was such a natural thing for us to do, and Cisco's got the complete breadth," Greene said to Robbins during their onstage meeting.
"This is a complex world that we're entering and we can't do it alone," she said. "So partnering with Cisco to get the full breadth of management and security as people build on-premise and then at their own pace they can move to the cloud, they can modernize their apps – you can help them do all of this. We really couldn't do it without partnering with Cisco."
The hybrid solution will extend network policy and configurations to multiple on-premises and cloud environments, including orchestration and lifecycle management of resources, applications, and services.
The solution's hyper-converged platform, Cisco HyperFlex, supports existing application and cloud-native Kubernetes environments. It also leverages Google's Apigee enterprise-class API management, which enables legacy workloads running on premises to connect to the cloud through APIs. Enterprise app developers can securely access cloud APIs, and cloud developers can securely access enterprise APIs and on-premises resources.