Cisco's Cloud Connector

Cisco Systems became one of the tech industry’s largest companies by selling truckloads of networking equipment to almost every business with a website. Many of its customers now need less of that—they rent computing capacity from IBM, Microsoft, and Amazon.com. That’s put Cisco in a tight spot. The company considered going into the cloud business itself but decided against it because it might have riled longtime customers such as phone companies that are doing the same thing. Then last December, at an annual gathering of Cisco executives, “the lightbulb went off,” says Nick Earle, a senior vice president for worldwide services sales and channels. “Let’s be the great connector.”

What came out of that meeting is an ambitious initiative that Cisco has dubbed Intercloud. In March the company unveiled a set of software tools that businesses can use to easily shift their IT workload among their own data centers and various cloud services. If Microsoft lowers its prices, a company, with a few clicks, could move jobs out of Amazon’s cloud or its own data centers.