Cisco and Red Hat provide the innovation stack with OpenShift

September 4, 2014Ashesh Badani3-minute read

Cisco has provided the world with technology to connect to one another for three decades. Now, they are aiming to connect all the objects (“things) people created. More than cars, mobile devices, and appliances, Cisco realizes that the true potential of a networked world would be the connection of everything, including watches, power plugs, writing utensils, cups, sensors, energy grids, and more.

Application is King

Of course, once all of our “things” start talking to each other, we will accumulate significant volumes of raw data. Processing the data to gain actionable insights will require a new generation of applications. This exponential data growth also requires a more efficient way to create, run and maintain applications. IT professionals need the flexibility to create new interactions with this diverse data set to maximize the value from the “connectedness” of the Internet of Things, placing a premium on innovation in application development. As part of today’s announcement, Cisco and Red Hat are collaborating to provide the ability for people to innovate at this application layer with OpenShift, our award-winning Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering.

This is a continuation of the collaboration Cisco announced in January, when they first shared that we were working together to integrate Cisco Prime™ network management and the Cisco IAC Service Catalog with OpenShift to provide dynamic scaling, tenant-level security, and integrated management and provisioning.

If it is this important, it has to be open.

Much before our collaboration around OpenShift began, Cisco realized that a solution stack that was not only open-sourced but, more importantly, was focused on the open sharing of technology, could bring incredible value to customers as they move to the cloud. This made it a natural choice for Cisco to use OpenShift as the PaaS solution that would enable people to drive the application innovation needed to make the Internet of Things a true success. OpenShift is a full-featured PaaS that offers users an ability to use the largest variety of application runtimes and frameworks and scale up as demand and usage increases.

If you are going to change the world, start at home.

This collaboration and joint offering builds upon Cisco’s own success deploying OpenShift for its internal development needs. Cisco IT deployed OpenShift Enterprise, our private PaaS offering, with the goal of building a platform that would enable them to offer Cisco’s developers any and all application runtimes and frameworks they required to innovate faster, while also lowering operating expenses. OpenShift is a polyglot PaaS, meaning it gave them the choices they were seeking in an enterprise-grade manner at a high density while still keeping mobility and elasticity for the applications that worked well within their larger technology mix. By placing the Cisco Prime Service Catalog in front of OpenShift as the user interface, Cisco IT was able to apply their internal ITIL best practice requirements to the innovation process without stalling it.

We’re thrilled with their success, and excited to offer the same developer productivity benefits realized within Cisco to service providers, public sector and other enterprises. Now, developers can take advantage of not only their traditional application stack, but they can also try new technology and ideas out at a lower cost to the company.

Cisco Servers, Cisco Prime Catalog, and OpenShift Accelerate PaaS

Red Hat and Cisco have been collaborating on figuring out what the technology stack needs to look like in order to keep pace with information that will result from the networking of “things”. We have discovered some truly remarkable customer validated designs that we feel our customers will benefit from as they also seek out new ways to innovate.

In the coming months, Cisco plans to offer a converged infrastructure built on Cisco and Red Hat technologies that would offer people a turn-key PaaS that uses OpenShift. At the same time, Cisco is also looking to incorporate OpenShift into their service provider offerings. As Cisco looks to offer its Cisco Cloud Infrastructure Platform to service providers to allow for more public cloud offerings to be available to global corporations, they rely on the PaaS technology from OpenShift. Cisco hardware, Cisco Prime Catalog, and OpenShift offer a technology stack made to enable open innovation.

The OpenShift community has benefited from the collaboration between Cisco and Red Hat. We have incorporated many of Cisco’s requirements back into the OpenShift solution. The OpenShift community is honored to be a trusted component of the innovation stack that we believe will help shape the next era of technology. We are excited that OpenShift is the PaaS chosen by Cisco to serve as their foundation for connecting the Internet of Things.

About the author

Ashesh Badani

Senior Vice President, Chief Product Officer

Ashesh Badani is Senior Vice President and Chief Product Officer at Red Hat. In this role, he is responsible for the company’s overall product portfolio and business unit groups, including product strategy, business planning, product management, marketing, and operations across on-premise, public cloud, and edge. His product responsibilities include Red Hat® Enterprise Linux®, Red Hat OpenShift®, Red Hat Ansible Automation, developer tools, and middleware, as well as emerging cloud services and experiences.

Previously, Badani was Senior Vice President of Cloud Platforms, where he helped solidify the company as a hybrid cloud and enterprise Kubernetes leader. Under his leadership, Red Hat has also expanded OpenShift from an award-winning Platform-as-a-Service solution to the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform, with 1,000+ customers spanning all regions and industries. Badani started at Red Hat overseeing product line management and marketing for the Red Hat JBoss® Enterprise Application Platform middleware portfolio.

Badani has played a significant role around strategy, analysis, and integration for key Red Hat acquisitions—including StackRox in 2021, CoreOS in 2018, and FuseSource in 2012—to bolster the company’s integration portfolio.

Prior to joining Red Hat, Badani served as Director of Product Management and Product Marketing of Integration and Application Platform Products at Sun Microsystems. He has more than 20 years of experience in the technology and finance industries at both established and emerging companies.

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