Update: Cisco plans $1 billion investment in global cloud infrastructure

Cisco Systems plans to invest over $1 billion to expand its cloud business over the next two years, including building an OpenStack-based "network of clouds" with partners. The whole IT industry is moving to a world where more applications are running in hosted environments, and Cisco doesn't want to be left behind. The key building blocks of this push are Cisco Cloud Services and what the networking giant has dubbed an Intercloud, which will be hosted across a global network of Cisco and partner data centers, it said on Monday. The Intercloud will be based on the increasingly popular OpenStack platform, and it will support any workload, on any hypervisor and interoperate with any cloud, both private and public, according to Cisco. By not going at it alone and instead partnering with local providers, Cisco's network of clouds will better positioned to address rising data sovereignty concerns, it said.