Multicloud means multichoice, and that can get complicated real fast.

When Chuck Robbins, chairman and chief executive officer of Cisco Systems Inc., spoke on his company’s earnings call last week, he acknowledged what enterprise companies had been experiencing for some time. Today’s businesses have a “more complicated environment than they had five years ago,” said Cisco’s CEO.

Which cloud for which workload? Which security controls? Which data privacy tools? To address these and other questions, Cisco and IBM Corp. have partnered for a number of years to tackle the complex problems in today’s information technology landscape.

“That complexity almost leads to paralysis for a lot of businesses,” said Jeff Gatz (pictured, right), IBM partner alliance executive at Cisco. “That’s where Cisco looks at IBM Services and says this is a partnership that will allow our customers to more easily transition into that next phase of digitization.”

Gatz spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu) and Lisa Martin (@LisaMartinTV), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the IBM Think event in San Francisco. They were joined by Craig Reese (pictured, left), Cisco global alliance executive at IBM, and they discussed market dynamics accelerating complexity in the multicloud environment and the impact on different industries. (* Disclosure below.)

Swipe and spin up

Enterprise transition to the multicloud model has been accelerated by the ease in which microservices and development environments can be created or “spun up.” While this has helped IT departments become faster and more agile, it has also led to increased demand for managing this complex new reality at scale.

“Customers have gotten spoiled,” Reese said. “Swipe a card and all of a sudden you’re spun up. Now they’re looking for that at a broader range across the enterprise.”

A Forrester Research Inc.survey in 2018 found that multicloud adoption was already receiving wider acceptance across multiple industries. A significant majority — 86 percent — of respondents described their strategy as multicloud, and 60 percent were either moving or had moved applications to the public cloud.

Cisco and IBM have become familiar with the needs of many different industries in this growing space. “The industry that seems to have the most questions, the most concerns, the most reservations is the financial services industry,” Reese said. “They have to be very specific around the data privacy issue and where they’re at with security.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the IBM Think event. (* Disclosure: Cisco Systems Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Cisco nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE