Google is joining forces with Cisco in the cloud in a move designed to help the tech giant woo new enterprise customers as it tries to catch up with Amazon’s domination of the cloud computing industry.
Google and Cisco announced Wednesday the unlikely alliance of the two tech titans by investing in ways to Cisco customers to migrate their applications and data from their existing data centers into Google’s cloud. The deal marks the first cloud computing partnership for Cisco, a $171 billion networking company with deep ties to large enterprise and Fortune 500 customers. But Cisco lacks a public cloud platform for its customers to tap into.
“Our partnership with Google gives our customers the very best cloud has to offer— agility and scale, coupled with enterprise-class security and support,” Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins said in a press release.
Google’s deal with Cisco is another sign of just how aggressive the company is about chasing valuable large enterprise customers. Google currently sits at a distant fourth place in the cloud wars, trailing the Amazon, Microsoft and Chinese powerhouse Alibaba in terms of public cloud market share. Google is already making headway in that area, announcing it had closed three times as many cloud deals worth more than $500,000 in the second quarter of 2017 compared to the same period last year.
If the deal pans out with Cisco, it could result in even more enterprise wins for Google, as it presents an opportunity for two companies to leverage each other’s different technologies. Cisco makes networking hardware and software that many companies now use to run their corporate networks, while Google has massive cloud computing resources available to businesses.
The alliance, according to the two companies, will enable them to offer the mixed computing environments companies are expected to maintain, as they shift more computing needs to the cloud while also continuing to run their existing IT facilities.
“This joint solution from Google and Cisco facilitates an easy and incremental approach to tapping the benefits of the Cloud,” Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene said. “This is what we hear customers asking for.”
