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

On Tuesday, July 23, 2013, Cisco announced an agreement to acquire Sourcefire. The agreement means Cisco and Sourcefire, a leader in intelligent cybersecurity solutions, will combine their world-class products, technologies and research teams to provide advanced threat protection across the entire attack continuum.

Check out the press release from Tuesday and read Cisco SVP of the Security and Government Group Chris Young's blog post for full details.

Impact of Cloud Consumption Models

In Edison Peres' latest blog, he showed you the "Impact of Cloud on IT Consumption Models" study. This study was created in collaboration with Cisco Consulting Services and Intel.

We already know that a large amount of IT spending is devoted to cloud and that number is only expected to increase during the next several years. Let Edison's blog guide you through the resources that help you prepare your business for the cloud opportunity and plan your IT spending accordingly.

Good Reads

• Carlos Dominguez discusses the relevance of Data in Motion
• Rosalie Guntrip educates on securing the open network environment
• Sara Sheikh shows how to leverage social media to attract top talent
• Gary Serda set up the virtual networking Channel Partner webcast

Keep An Eye Out

• Attend the next "Voice of the Engineer" session on July 31, 2013. This session describes the use of UCSM to manage c-series servers.
• 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.