Cisco has consolidated its data center, unified datacenter sharing and application portfolios under a new framework that is designed to solidify the company’s cloud vision from the outside.

“Because of our position in the network, it’s presupposed that the strategy is there. But we wanted to publicly announce a strategy that’s backed by a belief system where the market is going, “Eric Schoch, senior director for hosted collaboration solutions at the networking giant says.

CloudVerse encompasses several items, many of which will be available on a subscription basis in order to appeal to customers interested in a hybrid approach to optimize deployment, Scoch added.

Under the Unified Data Center category, CloudVerse offers the Cisco Intelligent Automation for the Cloud, a cloud delivery tool and the Cisco Network Services Manager’s virtual and physical management platform.  The Cloud-to-Cloud Connect network position software for the ASR 1000 and 9000 product families is also made available for customers, along with Cisco software and services. This category includes the Private Cloud HCS collaboration app, as well as software that enables carries to offer similar Cisco-powered services from the cloud to their own customers and technical services offered by the company and some of its partners.

Cisco has managed to build up a lot of support for the launch by signing up Fujitsu, LinkedIn, Qualcomm and several other large tech firms to CloudVerse.

Cisco’s cloud push comes alongside a number of similar initiatives by its competitors. Juniper Networks launched Junosphere Lab a couple months ago.  It’s a so-called networking-as-a-service that allows enterprise network engineers to test code on Juniper’s servers at scale. It’s a cheaper alternative to setting up a similar environment in-house, the company said, noting savings in overheads of up to 90 percent.