These are exciting times at Cisco as we continue our journey with you in  the world of many clouds. You may have read Rob Lloyd's announcement about the expansion of Cisco's Cloud strategy, and may wonder: do I really care?

I'm here to tell you yes, you should, and here's why: Cisco is doing what we do best -combining our leading edge technology, global reach and strength of our partnerships to provide our customers with cloud services built for high performance workloads, ensuring they are scalable, reliable and secure.

What makes Cisco global Intercloud unique is we have designed it from the ground up specifically for the Internet of Everything economy. Built on truly open standards, it used a distributed network architecture that provides intelligence at the edge to ensure the best possible application performance and data analysis.

Embedded with support for rich collaboration capabilities (like streaming video), add our partnerships and global build-out, and you get a level of data sovereignty, privacy and security that has simply not been available until now.

Today's increasingly networked connection of people, data, processes and things -the Internet of Everything -offers unprecedented opportunities. And Cisco global Intercloud is the first global network of clouds to offer the ability to securely leverage the right cloud for the right workload to create strategic advantage for rapid innovation and business growth today -and tomorrow.

We're building cloud services based on our experience as the#1 provider of public cloud infrastructure solutions for the fourth quarter in a row and as a global leader for data center hardware support for our customers' cloud projects, and as a global major player for cloud professional services  rated by IDC and the#1 most frequently used in the Americas in one of IDC's customer polls (1).

With many years of experience building Cisco's own cloud services, and helping build private clouds for our enterprise customers -an area where Forrester recently rated us as  #1 in private cloud strategy - as well as public clouds for our service provider partners, the one constant we have seen is, no single approach to cloud works for all.

The only approach to cloud thatwillwork for the long run is one in which application workloads are processed dynamically to leverage the best available resources, while providing the ability to simultaneously analyze and secure data with top performance. Cisco Cloud Services offers all that and more, including a global network of partners who provide scale, local presence and support.

Partners who develop Cisco Powered services will now be able to extend their portfolio through our global Intercloud for faster time to market and global scale.  (For more information, see Bob Gault's blog for channel partners and Doug Webster's blog for service providers, with more news to come on the expansion of our Cisco Powered program.)

We create value from the connections we make every day. The world's ever increasing number of connections means that thousands of applications will handle billions of data points in real time, and  these changes will require all customers to adapt quickly. In the future, these connections and these changes will increasingly come not just from the people we meet, but from the devices we use, the sensors in everyday appliances and the data footprints we create in our physical and digital lives.

At Cisco, the cloud company for tomorrow, we're ready to help you drive the business outcomes you need in this exciting new world order today. Stay tuned for more details!

Resources

• Cisco and Partners to Build World's Largest Global Intercloud,
  Cisco New Release, March 24, 2014
• Cisco Announces Breakthrough Hybrid Cloud Solutions by Rob Lloyd
• The Rise of the Intercloud by Fabio Gori
• IT's New Role in Strategic Cloud Services by Scott Clark
• Executing on Virtualization:  Cisco Evolved Services Platform by Doug Webster
• Cisco Leads in Public Cloud Infrastructure Market, Synergy Research, March 24, 2014
• IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Datacenter Hardware Support Services 2013 Vendor Assessment
• IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Cloud Professional Services 2013 Vendor Analysis
• The Forrester Wave?: Private Cloud Solutions, Q4 2013Source: 2013 IDC Services Group Survey: U.S. Professional Services Opportunities Related to Cloud Services, Doc#239862, March 2013.