Cisco's vision for 'The World of Many Clouds'? drove us to a leading position in the Cloud Market:

• Cloud infrastructure equipment sales: Ranked#1 in the industry three quarters in a row by Synergy Research for Q3 2013
• According to IDC analysts and buyer perception, Cisco is an IDC MarketScape "Major Player" worldwide. (IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Cloud Professional Services 2013 Vendor Analysis)
• Cisco named a "Strong Performer" and earns top marks on strategy for strategic vision and roadmap in private cloud software solutions (The Forrester Wave^TM: Private Cloud Solutions, Q4 2013, Forrester Research, Inc.)

On January 28, at Cisco Live! in Milan, we announced important extensions to our Cloud Portfolio.

In this fast evolving cloud market, customers require flexible solutions to extend their infrastructure, take advantage of public cloud services and optimize their sourcing options, while maintaining consistent policy and security mechanisms.

Use cases like Test and Develop, Capacity Augmentation and Disaster Recovery require customers to integrate internally sourced services with public cloud and virtual private cloud services. Business leaders are realizing that the use of public cloud services needs be to standardized by IT to manage escalating costs, security risks and compliance requirements.

Enterprises and public sector institutions are eager to embrace a hybrid cloud model, but current approaches offered by large public cloud providers are proprietary and lock customers into their way of consumption. Other hybrid cloud approaches require customer to have a consistent hypervisor environment.

Customers want to make hybrid cloud the new normal, and they expect to do it with choice, consistency, control and compliance.

Our new CiscoInterCloud solutionaccomplishes all that -it enables bi-directional secure workload mobility to and from any supported or participating cloud provider, is hypervisor agnostic and it works with heterogeneous infrastructures. Depending on your IT and business requirements you can now move your data and applications to the Public Cloud with end-to-end security.

At the same time, Cisco InterCloud allows cloud providers to lower the barrier to public and virtual private cloud adoption, and easily extend their customers encapsulated data center into the public cloud with consistent network and security policies.

Cisco InterCloud leverages Cisco's expertise across networking, security and compute to deliver unique capabilities:

• Extension of enterprise network and security to provider cloud. It appears as if the workload is within the enterprise and all the networking & security characteristics like VLAN segmentation, firewall policies, etc. are preserved
• Move the workloads across heterogeneous hypervisor and cloud environments through a translation mechanism which does not need application level changes
• Provide flexible application reachability, by preserving enterprise IP addressing schemes for internal access and using advanced routing functions for optimized external access

Cisco InterCloud is a fundamental addition to our Cisco One Software Platform where Cisco APIC plays the pivotal role of control point of the Application Centric Infrastructure. Thanks to this new addition, Cisco One will offer our customers the ability to extend ACI policies to public cloud services. That will deliver the ultimate level of choice, consistency and control that customers using public cloud services require.

Cisco is not alone in this initiative to unlock the power of open and secure hybrid clouds.

• Cloud Providers supporting this new announcement include: BT, CenturyLink Technology Solutions, Virtustream and Zerto.
• Technology Partners collaborating to develop the Cisco InterCloud solution are: Citrix, CSC-ServiceMesh, Denali Advanced Integration, EMC, Microsoft, Netapp, Rackspace, RedHat and VCE.

With Cisco InterCloud, an Open, Secure and Flexible hybrid cloud can be the new normal for IT.

Cisco's commitment to Interoperability and Open Standards

Cisco's commitment to interoperability and open standards is an essential component of our cloud strategy. In this area Cisco and Red Hat are working together on several key initiatives to extend OpenStack and enable open, interoperable cloud environments.

At Cisco Live! Milan we announced a new Cisco Validated Design for the integration of Cisco Prime Service Catalog with RedHat Openshift to allow customers to manage both legacy environments as well as web-scale cloud environments.

As part of our plans to extend our Cloud Management and Orchestration product line we are now releasing the 4.0 version ofCisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud,which takes our flagship cloud orchestration product beyond IaaS by seamlessly integrating with DevOps tools like Puppet and Chef as well as with new hybrid cloud functionalities.

Last but not least we are launching new Cisco Services for cloud strategy, management, and operations. The new services include Cisco Cloud Consumption Services, to unlock the potential benefits of cloud, and the Cisco Domain Ten? 2.0 framework, which helps companies strategically assess their IT environment readiness for IT transformation and their journey to cloud.

Cisco is uniquely positioned in the Cloud market -our Portfolio and GoTo Market model supports End-Customers to transform their IT environments to become fast, agile and reduce their TCO. At the same time we collaborate with our Cloud Partners to help them to innovate and generate new profitable revenue streams.

The Porfolio expansion we announced at Cisco Live Milan will mark the transition of the Cloud market to an open and secure environment with unprecedented opportunities for our Customers, Partners and for Cisco.

For more Information

• Cisco Cloud Launch Press Release
• Cisco Cloud Launch Website
• Cisco announces Open and Secure Hybrid Cloud with the Collaboration of Cloud Providers and Technology Partners