Cisco Systems has announced it is planning to make an entry into the field of cloud computing services with intentions to invest $1 billion on the technology over the next two years.
The Silicon Valley Company said it hopes to reap profits out of companies’ desires to rent computing services rather than buying and maintaining their own machines.
According to a The Wall Street Journal report, the networking hardware giant said the allotted amount will be used to build data centers to help run the new service called Cisco Cloud Services.
Cisco’s president of development and sales, Rob Lloyd, told the Journal that “Everybody is realising the cloud can be a vehicle for achieving better economics (and) lower cost.”
“It does not mean that we’re embarking on a strategy to go head-to-head with Amazon.”
Cisco said telecommunications companies Telstra Corp of Australia and Canada’s Allstream Inc are two of its early partners that have agreed to use its soon to be launched cloud service.
Last year, Microsoft, in an attempt to challenge Amazon’s lead in the growing business of cloud computing, announced a cut in prices for hosting and processing customers’ online data.
As per the Journal report, the company is planning to discuss the new service with its customers at a conference on Monday.
