At CiscoLive early in July Padmasree Warrior detailed some of the cloud direction within Cisco. The Localtechwire site picked up on some more details given my Padmasree during the 25/7/08 earnings call.

Here is the transcript curtsy of SeekingAlpha.

Cloud as we believe is perhaps one of the most network centric architectural shift that we are going to see in the IT industry in a long time. And the reason we believe that to be the case is virtualization is going to be the foundation to drive that. And so UCS becomes a core element from an architectural perspective in how we can enable large enterprises to build their own private cloud as well as service providers to provide the capability of virtual private clouds to enterprises and small businesses. Our cloud strategy is to link from an infrastructure perspective what we are doing in the data center all the way to the application delivery through SaaS. With SaaS offerings that we currently have with WebEx conferencing, security as a service with IronPort and some of the other capabilities. The key differentiation that we are focused on with respect to the network enablement is in providing security, which is a key concern of most enterprises in the today architecture with cloud as well as enabling higher levels of service agreements and providing the interoperability between different cloud architecture.

Some good themes emerge here.

Network centric. As I repeat often, cloud relies heavily on networking and there is lots for organisations and vendors to do here to make it effective, seamless and cost effective.

Virtualisation. Well virtualisation enables the cloud, as VMware have stated. However one must be aware of the distinction between IaaS and say SaaS. Virtualisation is a much stronger play in the IaaS. However lets not limit the term to just the server workloads, Network virtulisation is a strong element too, hence the reference to UCS.

Security. Always one to come up. When I was speaking at an event last week on cloud the Security question was raised, surprisingly it was not the first question. Looks like the Hoff (Director, Cloud & Virtualization Solutions @ Cisco) who has a strong background in security has his work cut out for him for a while. Not surprising that the strongest skill Cisco put into this key position was security.

Interoperability. Openness and flexibility are key elements that many in the industry are pushing as well as customers. Being able to have interoperability between different cloud vendors and architectures is key to wide adoption and a competitive market.

Interesting stuff. Good to see such core themes come out of a single statement. I suppose thats why Padmasree has the job she does, if it was easy any one could do it!

Rodos