When Google Cloud Chief Executive Officer Thomas Kurian took the stage at Next ’19 in San Francisco on Tuesday, he described how Google was listening to its customers. From the subsequent flow of announcements during the conference this week, developers must have figured prominently in those customer conversations.

Signs of Google’s developer courtship can be found in the announcement of the company’s expanded partnership with Cisco Systems Inc. to simplify the process of building multicloud platforms. The joint announcement integrates Cisco’s technology — including its HyperFlex and HyperFlex Edge solutions — with Google’s newly released Anthos, an open platform designed to run applications on-premises or in the public cloud.

Cisco’s executives are quick to point out that the new partnership will help facilitate application management, a key element for developer teams in the enterprise.

“It gives them a datacenter environment that has no boundaries,” said Kaustubh Das (pictured, left), vice president of product management at Cisco. “You can build an application in one place, deploy it in another, have it communicate with another application in the cloud, and suddenly you’ve demolished those boundaries between the datacenter and the cloud, between the datacenter and the edge. It becomes a continuum.”

Das spoke with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at theCUBE’s studio in Palo Alto, California. He was joined by Kip Compton (pictured, right), senior vice president of cloud platform and solutions at Cisco. Das and Compton spoke with Furrier for an exclusive Google and Cisco cloud announcement. They discussed the role of applications in facilitating multicloud deployment, the need for containerized applications, and how the partnership with Google will appeal to the DevOps community (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Application-fueled datacenter

The integration of Cisco’s technology with Google’s Anthos is in keeping with both firms’ multicloud vision of the datacenter, one that is fueled by applications. Cisco anticipated the “application revolution” when it acquired AppDynamics Inc., a provider of software tools for app performance monitoring, two years ago.

“AppDynamics exemplifies our focus on the application,” Compton explained. “That really comes from the fact that we understand that the only reason anyone builds any kind of infrastructure is ultimately to deliver applications and the experience that applications enable.”

Another key element of the joint announcement between Cisco and Google involves creating a mechanism for enterprise information technology to support developers and containerized applications. Cisco’s HyperFlex supports persistent storage for containers and the deployment of cloud-native apps with the Cisco Container platform.

“You can deliver to your developers a Kubernetes ecosystem and a toolset that is best in class, comes from Google, and is managed from the cloud,” Das said. “You’ve got to be sure the networking is enterprise-great at every single layer.”

Developers want the latest frameworks and the best libraries for their needs, something that the open-source community provides. The significance of the Cisco/Google announcement lies in its appeal to the DevOps world, which wants simplicity and agility in a multicloud ecosystem.

“The impact for our customers is that you have two leaders working together who believe in open technology and a multicloud approach,” Compton said. “We believe that both of those are fundamentally more aligned with our customers and the market than other approaches. Just as enterprises are extending into the cloud, so is Cisco.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* 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