Is Cisco killing its public cloud service?

Cisco has revealed it's planning to discontinue its Cisco Intercloud Services public cloud infrastructure in March next year as hybrid environments start to become more of a priority.

The company explained it will start using public cloud services rather than its own service, because that's what customers are asking for, rather than using private environments.

"Cisco continually re-evaluates its technology strategy as customers’ needs evolve," the company said in a statement. "The cloud market has shifted considerably in the last two years, and many of our customers are asking Cisco to help them develop cloud strategies that will help drive their digital transformations."

The company cited the "global availability of cloud offerings, the trend toward rapid application development with microservices, and the ability to orchestrate workloads across private and public clouds," as reasons to evolve its cloud services into hybrid solutions.

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"Our cloud strategy centres on building and delivering secure hybrid cloud infrastructure, platforms, and services - with our partners - that offer customers the freedom to choose the best environments and consumption models for their traditional and new cloud-native applications," it added.

The news won't come as a surprise to some of the company's customers, who were told about the changes to Cisco's cloud services back in October. It said it was phasing out Intercloud, which offered a tool for customers to migrate workloads from private clouds to public clouds.

"Cisco has internally communicated that we are discontinuing one of our internal cloud platforms and will be transitioning affected workloads onto other platforms," the company explained in a statement.

"We do not expect any material customer issues as a result of this transition. For the last several months we have been evolving our cloud strategy and our service provider partners are aware of this."