Every Friday, we'll highlight the most important Cisco partner news and stories of the week, as well as point you to important, Cisco-related partner content you may have missed along the way. Here's what you might have missed this week:

Off the Top

There are huge opportunities for growth in the mid-market and Cisco wants to help partners address that market. In fact, our research indicates the total addressable market for technology in mid-market is$25 billion and for services it's$30 billion by the year 2016.

This is just some of the information that Bruce Klein brought you this week in his blog "Accelerating Our Mutual Success in the Mid-Market." Even more exciting was the announcement of the consolidation of the Partner Led and Global Virtual Sales teams under the leadership of John Donovan.

Be sure to read Bruce's blog to get up to speed on Cisco's mid-market growth strategy.

Good Reads

• Teren Bryson discusses software defined networking in the Enterprise
• Raghunath Nambiar announces Flexpod Select with Hadoop
• Dave Evans talks about the workplace of the future
• Jim McHugh on Cisco and NetApp expanding the FlexPod portfolio

Keep An Eye Out

• Attend the Cisco Data Center: Know Your Pitch session on August 8 to nail your positioning pitch on Cisco's Data Center Architecture
• Check out the Marketing Velocity page for full details about all of our upcoming and archived webcasts.
• Swing by the Cisco Partner Event calendar for the latest information on Cisco partner gatherings.