[Note: For more perspective on the growing momentum for Cisco ACI and Nexus 9000, register today for our upcoming live ACI webcast: "Is Your Data Center Ready for the Application Economy", January 13, 2015, 9 AM PT, Noon ET, featuring more ACI customers and several key ACI technology partners.]

Momentum continues to build for Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) and Nexus 9000 Series Switches as we close out 2014 and head into the New Year. Cisco and TMC have announced that Cisco has been awarded to InfoTech Spotlight Data Center Excellence Awards for Cisco ACI and the Nexus 9000 series switch.

TMC, a global, integrated media company helping clients build communities in print, in person and online, announced the winners of the 2014 Data Center Excellence Awards last month, as presented by infoTECH Spotlight. For more than 20 years, TMC has been honoring technology companies with awards in various categories. These awards are regarded as some of the most prestigious and respected honors in the communications and technology sector worldwide. Winners represent prominent players in the market who consistently demonstrate the advancement of technologies. Each recipient is a verifiable leader in the marketplace.

InfoTech Spotlight brings extensive daily content focused on information technology. Visitors will find free industry news, communities, channels, blogs, feature articles, videos, whitepapers and other resources.  The site keeps readers informed about developments across topics including software, hardware, security and networking. InfoTech Spotlight is powered by TMCnet, the leading communications and technology site in the World attracting two million unique visitors monthly according to Webtrends.

These awards continue recent momentum for Cisco in the data center. Cisco announced last month that it has over 1000 customers for its new Nexus 9000 switch, which is the primary networking platform for ACI. ACI is Cisco's vision for SDN and policy-based automation. The awards also followed closely on Cisco's ACI momentum focus as part of its Global Editors Conference in early December, where several ACI customers presented their experiences.

The ACI early adopter panel included:

• Jaz Rahul, Sr. Manager, Network Engineering, E*Trade
• Trevor Moore, CIO, Qatar University, one of the region's top universities, with 18,000 students from 52 nationalities
• John Manville, SVP Infrastructure IT, Cisco
• Erik Sohlman, Manager of Infrastructure, Qbranch, Swedish hybrid cloud service provider
• Eduardo Maldonado, CTO  of UOL, Brazil's top service provider and IT outsource company
• Sheila Jordan, CIO of Symantec, a leading security company

 Cisco statistics on ACI market traction to date:

• 1000 Nexus 9000 switch and ACI customers
• 200 ACI solution customers (the APIC controller began shipping just four months ago on Aug. 1)
• 34 ACI ecosystem members, including the latest to join:  Check Point Software Technologies
• In September 2013, Cisco introduced the first formalized education and certification programs for SDN, based on Cisco's formal processes of job role/job task analysis aligned with Cisco's formal career certification processes.
• Cisco now has eight network programmability courses and six exams
• There are also four Cisco Network Programmability Specialist Certifications which allow professionals to augment their skills

 Key Comments from the Early Adopter Customers about ACI

"A significant portion of our operational staff time is spent provisioning and troubleshooting network end points. With ACI much of this becomes automated." -Jaz Rahul, Sr. Manager, Network Engineering, E*Trade

"Security is very key for our student population. It used to take about an hour per app to configure each firewall. Now, with ACI, we can do it all with one click."- Trevor Moore, CIO, University of Qatar

"A big factor in the decision to select ACI was its integration with existing and future platforms. The open APIs and open architecture gives us that flexibility."-Erik Sohlman, Manager of Infrastructure, Qbranch

"We looked at many SDN solutions and chose ACI because of simplicity, automation, cost reduction, and multi-tenancy capabilities. We needed the automation capabilities to be simple, straight forward and robust in order to connect our customers to the cloud. The key benefit is we can now offer one single solution to automate and simplify the network not only for our cloud but for our customers' networks."-Eduardo Maldonado, CTO  of UOL

"Symantec is going through a transition from outsourced IT to bring IT back in-house, so I was looking for new technology to "leapfrog" forward and transform IT in our next generation secure data center. We chose Cisco because of the ACI product offering and also because of the support and professional services to help our relatively new IT team.  ACI is very efficient and reduces costs, but even more important is the effectiveness for multi-tenancy, the open architecture, and the visibility across physical and virtual environments."   -Sheila Jordan, CIO of Symantec

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