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The
agreement, to be announced later on Tuesday, means the two
companies will jointly sell Pivotal Cloud Foundry, which helps
developers build and run software on the cloud, and Cisco's
Metapod, a service that lets companies make their data centers
more cloud-friendly.
Pivotal's service helps companies deploy a free, but hard-to-use
open-source technology also called Cloud Foundry, much as the
free operating system known as Linux generally requires services
of a consultant like Red Hat Inc.
Pivotal Cloud Foundry competes with services such as IBM's
Bluemix and HP Enterprise's Helion, while Mirantis competes with
Metapod.
The so-called cloud has become a broad term for quick delivery
of data over the Internet, often by sharing computing resources
with other companies.
As growth has slowed in Cisco's main business of switches and
routers, in part due to customers turning to technology that
relies more on software than hardware, it has looked for
business in new areas such as the cloud, often through
acquisitions.
It is unclear if Cisco will be able to expand its newer
cloud-based offerings at a strong enough rate to make up for
weaknesses in its core business.
In 2014, Cisco sold most of its stake in a collaboration to
offer cloud hardware with EMC Corp and EMC's majority-owned
virtualization company VMWare Inc. EMC is also the majority
owner of Pivotal, which spun out of the storage giant in 2013.
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