Cisco Cisco Intercloud Fabric for Business 白書

Cisco IT Lays the Foundation for 
High-Visibility, Analytics-Driven Supply Chain 

Cisco IT Insights 

 

 

 

© 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. 

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What 

Cisco has a complex, global supply chain with multiple partners and many nodes, the majority of them outsourced. Data exchange, 

communication, and collaboration across this ecosystem are vital. Like many other enterprises, however, the operational efficiency 

and performance of our supply chain is fettered by the lack of real-time, multi-tier visibility, and compounded by limited workload 

portability and data latency. We aim to obliterate these limitations using Cisco Intercloud Fabric, a solution currently in proof of 

concept (POC) within our supply chain. 

“Intercloud Fabric enables spontaneous, immediate connection with all the supply chain nodes. It provides real-time visibility into 

data and inventory movement,

” says Shanthi Iyer, Director, IS, Supply Chain Management at Cisco. “With this information, we’ll be 

able to make delivery, demand, 

and customer service decisions faster, in real time, across the entire supply chain ecosystem.” 

Using Cisco Intercloud Fabric, we are deploying a hybrid environment that is open, highly secure, and operates in one unified 

cloud outside our data center boundary

. We manage it. We’re in control of it. Because private and public clouds merge seamlessly 

using Intercloud Fabric, we can apply the same network security, quality of service (QoS), and access control policies in the public 

clouds that we enforce in our data centers. 

In our existing (pre-POC) supply chain, partners connect to Cisco through a business-to-business (B2B) cloud. All data travels from 

the Cisco private cloud through the B2B cloud, and then to partners and supply chain nodes. This arrangement entails multiple 

hops and contributes to data latency. 

For the POC, w

e’re deploying Intercloud Fabric within the supply chain ecosystem, focusing on data exchange with partners. We’ll 

select a logistics partner and an Electronics Manufacturing Services (EMS) partner to participate in phase two. Launched in 

November 2014, the POC will run through April 2015. 

For phase one, completed in early January 2015, we used Intercloud Fabric to move XMLGen workload from the Cisco private 

cloud to a provider cloud (see Figure 1). The provider cloud is also a platform for compute power. Because Intercloud Fabric 

establishes direct connections to all our supply chain nodes, if someone changes an order (the 

quantity, where it’s being shipped, 

etc.), data is instantaneously updated to the cloud platform directly from the affected node or nodes. Multiple hops and 

transmissions are eliminated. 

In phase two of the POC, partners will be able to access the provider cloud directly and exchange data in real time. Throughout the 
POC, we’re keeping the B2B cloud enabled for partners who can’t access the provider cloud. 

In our target end state, Intercloud Fabric will move data from the Cisco private cloud to multiple provider clouds (partners or in-

region service providers) that will host XMLGen in real time. Our partners and supply chain nodes will have secure, direct access 

to the cloud platform based on their needs (see Figure 2).