Case Study: Cisco WebEx achieves a rapid, highly available private cloud and faster deployments with OpenStack

Cisco Webex - Customer Case Study

Cisco WebEx, a long-standing SaaS collaboration business within Cisco Systems, faced a fragmented 16-year infrastructure that hindered agility for always-on voice, video and screen‑sharing services across nearly 20 global sites. The team needed a private, API‑driven cloud that supported complex network and mixed physical/virtual workloads, avoided public‑cloud constraints and vendor lock‑in, and enabled tighter engineering‑operations collaboration for continuous deployment.

WebEx selected OpenStack (Essex with select Folsom components) and engaged Mirantis to design and deploy a highly available private cloud across two datacenters, including HA controllers, load balancing, Puppet automation for provisioning, and a customized Nova scheduler for fault‑tolerant volume placement. The result was faster, repeatable deployments and multiple releases per day, delivering public‑cloud speed with private‑cloud control and attracting interest from other Cisco product teams.

Webex by Cisco

Reinhardt Quelle

Operations Architect