Cisco Systems Inc. is throwing its weight behind Google Cloud’s hybrid cloud services platform, newly rebranded as Anthos.

The networking giant is integrating some of its core hardware platforms and software products with Google Cloud’s Anthos, formerly called Cloud Services Platform. It’s all part of a push by Cisco to become more relevant in a world where enterprises are increasingly adopting so-called “multicloud” strategies, where computing workloads are spread across several cloud platforms and private data centers.

Anthos is the latest iteration of Google LLC’s hybrid cloud play, which is designed to help customers move their cloud workloads into private data centers and run them just as efficiently. The idea is to make it simpler to run services both in the cloud and in on-premises data centers, giving customers greater choice over which environments to run their applications in. That’s all well and good, but those customers also need peace of mind that their on-premises infrastructure is up to the task of running those cloud workloads without any disruption, and that’s where Cisco reckons it can help.

Today’s integrations are the result of months of collaboration between Cisco and Google. The companies first announced they were joining forces back in October 2017. At the time, they said the plan was to enable companies to run software consistently in hybrid computing environments.

Cisco also revealed a bit about how it’ll make this happen. In a blog post, Kip Compton, senior vice president of the Cloud Platform and Solutions Group at Cisco, said the company is integrating its two main hardware platforms with Anthos, namely its Cisco HyperFlex and Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure offerings.

HyperFlex (pictured) is a “hyperconverged infrastructure” platform that combines software-defined storage and data services with the Cisco Unified Computing System, which is a converged infrastructure system that integrates computing, networking and storage resources. Cisco ACI, meanwhile, is a software-defined networking platform for building networks that span both clouds and private data centers. Other Cisco offerings, including Cisco Stealthwatch Cloud, Cisco SD-WAN and Cisco Intersight, are also being integrated with Anthos.

Cisco’s collaboration with Google also extends to some of the latter’s key application development platforms. For example, Cisco’s infrastructure is being optimized to run Google Kubernetes Engine, which is a managed service that helps to orchestrate clusters of software containers that are used to host modern applications.

The collaboration extends as well to Istio, which is a service mesh that’s used to connect, manage and secure the components of containerized apps, known as microservices.

In an interview with SiliconANGLE, Fabio Gori, Cisco’s senior director of cloud solution marketing, said the integrations with GKE and Istio are key because they enable a “managed continuous integration/continuous development pipeline” from Google’s cloud to customers’ data centers. This is an industry first, Gori said, and will enable developers to push fixes and updates automatically, no matter where their apps are hosted.

There’s also a big focus on artificial intelligence. Cisco and Google have created new software for Kubeflow, which is an open-source Kubernetes-native platform for developing, orchestrating, deploying and running large machine learning workloads.

Essentially, Cisco is trying to position its platforms as the best bet for companies that want to run their Google cloud workloads on-premises. The benefits of doing so go beyond simple efficiency, extending to security and data ownership, Gori said.

Kaustubh Das, vice president of strategy and product management, storage, for Cisco’s Computing Systems Product Group, and Compton, spoke extensively about the Google collaboration in an exclusive pre-show conversation with theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s video studio.

“We’ll be doing a lot of integrations that really bring a lot of what we’ve learned through out joint work with them over the last few years,” Compton said. “The degree of integration across our data center portfolio and also our networking and security portfolios will ultimately give customers one of the most secure and flexible multicloud and hybrid architectures.”

Here’s the full interview:

Photo: Cisco