A steady stream of announcements from the Cisco Live gathering in Barcelona last week provided a clear message that Cisco Systems Inc. was positioning itself to take multicloud programmability to the edge, accompanied by a suite of solutions to automate distributed computing.

It was a significant change for a company that had spent the better part of nearly four decades “hugging routers,” as one company executive recently described it. Yet the changes taking place in information technology are dictating new approaches based on customer demand for consistent policies and a means of networking in an application-driven universe.

“What you’re now seeing is a completely different world where applications want the infrastructure to be programmable and accessible and still extremely secure,” said Fabio Gori (pictured), senior director of cloud solution marketing at Cisco. “Our entire company strategy is wrapped around this concept of intent-based architecture.”

Gori spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at theCUBE’s studio in Palo Alto, California. They discussed Cisco’s recent announcements involving application deployment to multiple clouds, bringing compute to the data and introducing a suite of tools for cloud management. (* Disclosure below.)

Gap between need and network

Core to Cisco’s approach is closing the gap between what a business needs and what the network delivers. This is the mission of an intent-based network. To help customers along that path, Cisco took its Application Centric Infrastructure, or ACI, and extended it across multiple domains, with the goal to allow policy implementation across the multidomain board.

“We’re extending ACI to the cloud, to Azure and Amazon Web Services,” Gori said. “Now we have one construct that extends from the edge to the data center to the cloud. That’s a pretty big deal.”

Cisco also announced that it would extend HyperFlex, its converged infrastructure system, from core data centers to branch offices. The move recognized an ongoing need to move compute to where the data resides.

“We’re taking both our networking and our computing platforms anywhere the application needs them,” Gori said.

Kubernetes-based cloud tools

Because managing applications in public and private cloud environments can be a complicated and expensive business, Cisco deployed CloudCenter Suite to provide workflow automation and cost optimization for IT customers. The CloudCenter software was written in Kubernetes to enhance portability and scalability for users, according to Gori.

“We think the approach should be different,” he explained. “The approach should be to model the applications once. Once you model your application, you can use any of these other clouds as a target for implementation.”

Cisco’s vision is for a cohesive, fluid environment where policy and security models transform fragmented architectures into domains that a business can control and automate.

“It’s pretty simple actually,” Gori said. “Our goal is to map the business intent into the infrastructure underneath. If we’re right, and I think we are, this is going to be a great ride.”

Here’s the complete video interview with Gori, part 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