Yesterday at Cisco Live! Milan we announced Cisco's expanded, industry-leading cloud portfolio to pave the way for interoperable and highly secure public, private and hybrid clouds. If you want to learn more about the recent additions to our Cloud portfolio, Fabio Gori's blog will provide you with a great summary.

We have a very clear strategy for cloud and I will talk more about it in future blogs; however, for the time being here's a quick overview (Imagine a New IT Video)

Strategy per se is great ... but without execution.... it is not fascinating . With our comprehensive cloud portfolio in conjunction with our partner ecosystem, you can deploy and capitalize on the World of Many Clouds? in the way that makes the most sense for your business. And we do have a cloud portfolio to match and that we can put to work for you in context to help you achieve your goals. Here is my attempt to outline our cloud portfolio more broadly beyond the recent announcement.

Plan your Cloud

Let's start with services .... At any stage of your cloud journey, you can consider a Cisco Domain Ten^SMengagement. This industry-unique framework, embraced by global businesses to guide their IT and data center transformation, helps you methodically plan the next stages of your organization's journey to the cloud. Starting from your current state of readiness, you gain a holistic view of your IT environment, and then project your desired state and identify the gaps that must be filled to address infrastructure, application, security, compliance, process, and governance implications for your cloud plans. It is extremely comprehensive!

Build Your Cloud 

For a number of reasons many of our customers want to capitalize on many of the cloud benefits without moving their applications and/or data outside of their data centers. These customers want to build and own their private clouds. And to do that, not every customer needs to leverage our Services for Cloud Strategy, Management and Operations. We have a phenomenal array of Integrated and Converged Infrastructure solutions offered by Cisco in conjunction with our technology partners to help simplify and accelerate cloud and application deployments. We unify best of breed compute, switching, storage, and management technologies:

• Cisco and NetApp's FlexPod Portfolio: Cisco UCS, Cisco Nexus Switches and NetApp Storage
• Cisco Solutions for EMC VSPEX: Cisco UCS, Cisco Nexus and EMC VNXe/VNX Storage
• VCE's Vblock Converged Infrastructure: Cisco UCS, Cisco Nexus Switches and EMC Storage

And our unique approach to OpenStack helps to enable the rapid delivery of cloud infrastructure and applications with the right quality of service.

Manage Your Cloud

Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud (IAC)  is a comprehensive cloud management platform that delivers a solid foundational private and hybrid cloud platform that easily expands to more sophisticated use cases such as PaaS, network automation, and anything as a service. Cisco IAC can meet your private and hybrid cloud requirements with room to grow cloud service delivery across your entire organization.

Cisco UCS Director delivers unified infrastructure management for administering computing, network, virtualization, and storage from one self-service web interface, with Cisco Data Center Assessment and Deployment Services supporting implementation.

Extend Your Cloud

When you're ready to extend and integrate your hybrid cloud, Cisco has a solution for that as well.  With Cisco InterCloud, you will be able to create an open, transparent, and highly secure hybrid cloud environment across multiple cloud providers and between your premises-based applications and the public cloud. Retain complete control and security with a hybrid cloud orchestration and management framework, and help ensure consistency of network and security policies. Under the Cisco ONE umbrella, Cisco InterCloud can be integrated into higher-level management solutions, such as Cisco IAC or other cloud management solutions that our ecosystem partners provide.

Discover the extent of the hidden cloud ("shadow IT") within your organization with Cisco Cloud Consumption Services that harness network intelligence to analyze your cloud use, risk profile, and cloud spending, enabling informed decisions to better manage risks and costs. Next, engage Cisco Business Readiness Services to help articulate the strategy and develop the business case and an architecture-led master plan for your cloud transformation and move to hybrid cloud.

Buy Cisco Powered Cloud Services from a Cisco Partner

Additionally, more than 190 certified partners around the world offer cloud services that run on Cisco infrastructure and solutions. You can be confident that these services are delivered on validated Cisco architectures from a qualified provider. And every service is audited by a third-party. Cisco Powered cloud services are protected by our security solutions, from the data center through the network to applications. Choose from a number of Cisco Powered cloud services based on the following Cisco solutions:

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
• Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS)
• Hosted Collaboration Solution for Contact Center (HCS for CC)
• Telepresence as a Service (TPaaS)
• Desktop as a Service (DaaS)
• Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)

Accelerate Your Cloud ROI

Start reaping the benefits of your cloud initiative faster. Cisco Services for Cloud Strategy, Management, and Operations, available from expert Cisco consultants and our channel partners, guide you in assessing opportunities and developing and implementing your unique cloud strategy and plan.

Use our plan-build-manage IT lifecycle services to achieve three critical success factors for your cloud strategy: the optimal mix of cloud consumption models, reduced exposure to business and IT risks during your transition and cloud service delivery, and the capability to intelligently automate the cloud environment. This fuels a competitive advantage, including new business models, new market opportunities, and the capability to monetize business assets, all while reducing your total cost of ownership.

And as always to learn more you can begin here.