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Cisco greedily slurps up private cloud-AAS upstart Metacloud

A small part of John Chambers' $1bn cloud play goes into action

Cisco is buying Metacloud, a startup that promises to spin-up OpenStack clouds both privately and as a service.

Metacloud will be folded into Cisco’s Cloud Infrastructure and Managed Services unit, building Cisco’s InterCloud initiative – which the firm announced in March.

Cisco chief executive John Chambers pledged he’d spend $1bn over two years to expand his company’s share of the cloud business. The idea is to build a world of connected and interoperable clouds.

Metacloud’s OpenStack theoretically fits in because it allows customers to build an OpenStack cloud in their own data centers or hosted by Metacloud.

The Metacloud software provides network, compute, storage and identity for OpenStack while, the company claims, also supporting “core” Amazon Web Services APIs. The latter is for those who burst parts of their cloud out to AWS.

Cisco is an OpenStack project member and contributor.

Hilton Romanski, senior vice president of Cisco corporate development, said in a statement that Metacloud’s technology would play a “critical role” in overcoming infrastructure and data silos as companies move from purely on premises IT to hybrid IT.

He reckoned Metacloud would provide IT administrators with choice, visibility and data sovereignty.

Metacloud founder and chief executive Steve Lynch said in a company blog that Cisco and partners would offer MetaCloud Openstack private cloud as a service to enable that world of hybrid IT while service providers could deploy MetaCloud as a complement to their public cloud deployments.

Metacloud was founded in August 2011 by Lynch, a former vice president of technology operations at Ticketmaster Entertainment, and president Steve Curry who’d managed global storage operations at Yahoo!. The company had secured $40m in funding.

Financial terms of the Cisco deal were not revealed, but the acquisition is expected to complete in the first quarter of 2015.®

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