It's late Sunday night in Las Vegas as I write this from my hotel room -Cisco's day one MMS 2013 blog post. It has been a long day already here at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center getting set up for the show... Our Cisco booth is complete; UCS, Nexus 1000V, FlexPod, and VSPEX Engineers have their demos loaded and ready to go; the always popular Cisco t-shirts are stocked and ready to be handed out; the Event team is here and primed.

Over dinner tonight I was mulling over with my core event team what to write about in this blog. For some reason, and I forget why, we had been discussing Napoleon at the table. So, I started searching for some famous Napoleon quotes that might apply to technology, I.T. management, and Cisco's activities at MMS 2013.

I found this quote from Napoleon Bonaparte: "Imagination rules the world". Those four simple words are so very true when it comes to the power inherent in Cisco's Nexus 1000V and UCS management capabilities. We've all learned about the powerful hardware architecture of UCS -with its modular approach to helping you deliver a modern datacenter for compute, networking, virtualization, and storage. I think at MMS 2013 though  people will see the imagination, andinnovationif I can add to that, of what Cisco  UCS Manager and Nexus 1000V Engineers have delivered for Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 SP1.

Cisco's management portfolio is focused on doing what we know best -managing the compute, network, and virtualization infrastructure layers. We partner in the most complementary way with Microsoft's System Center management portfolio. Together we offer a true 'better together' model affording end to end management ranging from the hardware chassis to the business transaction.

So, if you are at MMS 2013 this week, check us out in booth#501. We've got a set of demos anchored by Nexus 1000V and its integration into the Hyper-V Extensible Switch as well as a strong set of Cisco UCS Manager and Cisco PowerTool for PowerShell demos. Completing our demos is kiosk's devoted to our private cloud solutions with our strategic partners NetApp and EMC respectively FlexPod, VSPEX.

If you are not at MMS 2013, we encourage you to check out our Microsoft capabilities at www.cisco.com/go/microsoft.