Cisco Systems said it will invest US$1bn into customer and partner cloud interoperability projects over the next two years, attempting to bridge the gap between public and private clouds.

Most of the funding will be focused on Intercloud - a partnership between cloud providers, builders and aggregators which enables customers to easily take their workloads from their private cloud to the public cloud and back, as well as transfer them between data centers and across borders.

On Monday, 30 new members joined Intercloud including BT, Deutsche Telekom, NTT DATA and Equinix, adding another 250 data centers across 50 countries to its roster.

To advance the initiative, Cisco has started shipping its software-based, hypervisor-agnostic cloud interconnect technology called Intercloud Fabric. The company also announced it will begin offering its own hybrid cloud bundles.

A network of clouds could become “the next Internet”, at least according to Robert Lloyd, president of Development and Sales at Cisco.

High ambitions

“Today, the lack of ability to connect public clouds, and to move workloads and associated policies between clouds, coupled with an inability to manage public and private clouds together as a single capability, prevents IT organizations from buying cloud services from any vendor they choose and managing these services as if they were part of their extended private cloud,” explained Lloyd in a blog post.

“In essence, our customers and partners face a similar problem our founders solved back in 1984: they want to unify islands of connectivity and scale that unified infrastructure globally and securely.”

Intercloud was introduced in January as a global network of clouds that Cisco hopes will enable a new generation of standardized, easily transportable applications. In light of recent surveillance scandals, the initiative also eases compliance with regional data protection laws that require organizations to store data locally.

Now, the company has announced that some of the major cloud providers are starting to take notice. For example, BT will leverage Intercloud Fabric to develop hybrid cloud services that connect with the Cisco Cloud and with the services of other Intercloud providers.

Deutsche Telekom will deploy Intercloud nodes and Intercloud Fabric within its data centers in Germany, which will be operated by the T-Systems division. It will deliver sovereign Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings that meet Germany’s strict data protection rules, but are available to the rest of Europe.

Equinix will work with Cisco to develop a hosted private cloud solution that utilizes the Equinix Cloud Exchange to deliver highly secure access to cloud service providers in Equinix data centers across 16 different markets.

“By connecting Cisco Intercloud and Cloud Exchange, we are adding policy, performance, security and visibility all the way to the application level, removing performance concerns sometimes associated with hybrid cloud services,” said Ihab Tarazi, CTO at Equinix.

“Elasticity is essential for enterprises, and by providing a private, high bandwidth, highly secure infrastructure, we’re allowing enterprises to achieve their vision of a truly elastic cloud.”

Other organizations to join Intercloud include 26 cloud providers like Adapt, Ethan Group and Logicalis, four cloud builders like Dimension Data and Presidio, and three service aggregators like Ingram Micro.

Cisco will begin offering hybrid cloud bundles suitable for both new customers and those who want to extend their private infrastructure to Cisco’s IaaS offering.

“Just as Cisco played a leading role in connecting isolated islands of LANs to architect the modern Internet, Cisco’s Intercloud Fabric and Application Centric Infrastructure innovations uniquely position us to connect disparate cloud services to unlock the full potential of cloud, and with it a new era in IT,” said Lloyd.