Cisco Systems Inc.’s announcement today that it would extend its Application Centric Infrastructure, or ACI, into Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services clouds added another chapter in the networking company’s continued journey to become a key player in the multicloud world.

“The role of hyperconvergence is certainly key in the announcements today,” John Furrier (@furrier), co-host of theCUBE, SilicoANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, said on the opening day of the Cisco Live event in Barcelona. “Multicloud truly will require data to be moving around, automated and deployed across domains. This is a cross-domain challenge.”

Furrier spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-hosts of theCUBE, and they discussed product enhancements for bridging multiple compute environments, what Cisco brings to network security and the growing significance of developers in the multicloud ecosystem. (* Disclosure below)

Extending HyperFlex to multiple sites

In addition to its ACI news, Cisco also extended HyperFlex hyperconverged technology to multiple sites for distributed storage and compute, which includes a bridge from customers’ core data centers to the edge.

“It’s clearly Cisco’s strategy to be the best at connecting, whether it’s on-premises and public clouds or between public clouds,” Vellante said. “Cisco’s got to make the case that on its networks you’re going to be higher performance and more secure. That’s certainly what they’re implying.”

The analysts noted that security was a key theme in the keynotes from Barcelona on the first day, with speakers emphasizing the benefits of central policy control provided through ACI and other services. One executive made the point that Cisco offered 24,000 engineers working on network security.

“It’s an army,” Miniman noted. “There’s very few companies, outside of Google, Amazon and Microsoft, that can call on that engineering strength.”

As Cisco moves more strongly into the multicloud world, it is also placing greater emphasis on the critical role of developers. The company’s DevNet program was formed to help developers write applications and develop integrations with Cisco products.

“If you walk around the DevNet zone here, a lot of the stuff that’s happening isn’t networking; they’re builders,” Miniman said. “It’s less about the coding; it’s more about my application, my data and my building.”

Here’s the complete video analysis, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Cisco Live this week. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a media partner of Cisco Live. Neither Cisco nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on SiliconANGLE or theCUBE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE