With the cloud wars heating up, Cisco Systems has just announced a signifcant expansion of its Intercloud ecosystem, with 30 new global partners and a $1 billion injection of cash from Cisco Capital.

Cisco is hoping to boost adoption of its Intercloud, an OpenStack-based technology that aims to bridge the gap between cloud service providers by connecting disparate platforms with secure private access. It cites rapid growth of the hybrid cloud model as the driving force behind its Intercloud expansion, saying that more and more enterprises are using services that rely on multiple public and private clouds.

As such, Cisco’s just welcomed the likes of British Telecom, Deutsche Telecom, Equinix and NTT DATA into its ecosystem, which it claims will provide users with a globally distributed hybrid platform with “near infinite” scalability and the benefits of local hosting and data sovereignty.

New partners including Comstor, Ingram Micro and Tech Data will become aggregators of Cisco’s Intercloud, the company said.

“As we look ahead to the next 30 years at Cisco, we’ll look back on today as a milestone almost as significant as that day in 1984 when our founders helped two network islands talk to each other,” wrote Cisco President Rob Lloyd. “Perhaps more importantly, I think we’ll look back on today as the day we enabled customers to achieve the vision of hybrid IT and created the IT platform truly ready for the Internet of Everything.”

In a blog post, Equinix CTO Ihab Tarazi described how Uber runs analytics on passenger/driver data, credit card processing and live traffic data in multiple clouds.

“The credit card processing could be done in a private cloud whose infrastructure is being managed by Cisco Metacloud OpenStack distribution, while the analytics processing could be occurring in a public cloud, such as AWS,” wrote Tarazi. “That creates a need to stitch the disparate underlying infrastructures into a seamless whole that can satisfy the performance and availability service level agreements (SLAs) and security and compliance policies of the applications.”

Along with its new partners, Cisco has just launched new Hybrid Cloud bundles that allow private cloud users to extend their infrastructure inside Cisco’s Information-as-a-service offering. The bundles also allow non-public cloud users to gain the same capabilities with a complete hybrid cloud and Cisco’s IaaS solution.

Cisco’s Intercloud network now encompasses an additional 250 data centers located in 50 countries, while the $1 billion cash infusion will be used to help fund its cloud partners.

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