Cloud and SaaS specialist intY has announced the availability of fully supported Cisco hardware on CASCADE.
The addition of the Cisco products to the cloud provisioning platform provides partners with the high end switching capability they need to assure the end user experience for cloud services and achieve long-term customer retention.
Cisco is the latest vendor to sign up to CASCADE, joining the likes of Symantec and Microsoft and other independent software vendors in the co-operative-style marketplace, which now boasts hundreds of product and application offers.
Chris Baldock, MD of intY, said: "Vendors are increasingly turning to the cloud to provision their products and services, evidence of its readiness for the mass market.
"For the channel, this marks a huge opportunity with SMBs. We already have 200 agents and resellers signed to CASCADE and we're looking to recruit a further 200 in the UK by the end of the year.
"CASCADE offers an easy platform from which to break into cloud computing, making it especially attractive to smaller resellers."
Resellers using the CASCADE platform can now bundle fully supported Cisco product as-a-service with other cloud applications of their choice, creating a stable end-to-end cloud solution for resellers to take to their business customers.
"Forget the last-mile, in cloud services, it's the last 10 yards that count," added Baldock. "All too often resellers underestimate the importance of physical infrastructure in the success of cloud services. Bandwidth dependent and sensitive applications are common in business today, so assuring high performance delivery is key and that goes beyond the cloud-hosting environment. End users need business critical apps to perform in order to determine a RoI from cloud.
"Cisco routers complete the CASCADE cloud service offering. Our resellers can provide customers with end-to-end cloud performance from the data centre right to the desktop to enable businesses to experience the real value of cloud, without poor connectivity getting in the way."