“We’ve listened to our customers,” Robbins told CNBC. “They’re looking for cloud speed and scale and agility, but they want the flexibility of running applications in private data centers as well as in public clouds.”
The Google-Cisco offering will be available for early customers in the first half of 2018 and will hit the broader market in the second half of the year.
Greene highlighted Kubernetes and Istio as two open-source products that will have particular resonance with Cisco customers. Kubernetes was developed by Google, and allows developers to build and deploy apps in digital containers. Istio was created by Google, IBM and ride-hailing start-up Lyft and is used for managing microservices, or small software programs that are stitched together to perform a variety of functions. Both technologies help programmers build software more quickly and flexibly, and make it more reliable and less likely to crash.
Google and Cisco aren’t divulging how the revenue split will work. And Robbins said there’s nothing in the deal that precludes Cisco from forging similar partnerships with other cloud providers, should the opportunity arise.
With AWS still growing at almost 40 percent a year, Google is eager to show the market where it has advantages over its rivals.
“Customers are excited about this when we explain it to them,” Greene said. “It lets them see where we’re going and how we’re going to do it.”
— CNBC’s Josh Lipton contributed to this report.
