Cisco Pushes ACI to AWS and Azure, Embraces ‘Data Center Anywhere’ Strategy

Cisco extended Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), its SDN technology, into Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure public clouds as part of its new “data center anywhere” strategy. It sounds similar to VMware’s “NSX everywhere” push, which seeks to stretch that vendor’s networking and security capabilities from data centers to clouds and the edge. There’s a good reason for this. It illustrates enterprises’ movement toward distributed IT environments. And vendors are following suit with products that allow companies to deploy their workloads where it makes most sense to do so. “Customers want to be empowered in this distributed multi-cloud world to land their workloads where they fit best,” said IDC analyst Matt Eastwood. “The only way an enterprise can regain some semblance of control is to run the same stack across all of these environments. While this is precisely what VMware is doing, they are by no means alone. Cisco’s approach has merit too.”