Cisco outlined its Cloud plans

Cisco announced its plans for delivering Cloud Computing services. The company’s cloud strategy relies on its hardware to make its WebEx collaboration software run economically. Cisco sees the cloud as having four layers: infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings, platforms as a service (PaaS),  software as a service (SaaS) and hardware infrastructure. So the company wants to play in all layers except IaaS (because it’s where its service provider customers want to build their own businesses). Besides, Cisco wants to provide an “inter-cloud” system for communications among the various clouds as the technology world will have to work on open standards for naming, directories, and presence awareness, as well as protect corporations that don’t want to have such openness between clouds.