While Cisco may not be a cloud provider, we are a trusted, cloud-agnostic technology partner that has been enabling and empowering customers to expand to all their clouds with the reliability, security and scalability you can only expect from Cisco. We have a broad portfolio of application-to-infrastructure solutions that help our customers see, manage and simplify their multicloud environments.

Reinforcing what we already knew, CRN recently named Cisco one of the 100 Coolest Cloud Computing Companies for 2021.  This recognition is important for a couple of reasons. First, 2020 accelerated the migration to the cloud because of its ability to deliver agility anywhere. With COVID19, the dependency on the Internet has only gotten stronger, and businesses are moving to multiple clouds even faster. As they should. The power of the cloud allows us to more easily work from home or anywhere we want. But the cloud is also a vast platform for innovation that allows us to create highly engaging experiences, personalized to each one of us.

In today's hyper-distributed, zero-trust, socially distant world, the application is the primary window of engagement for employee collaboration, customer sales and support, patient treatment and even student education. Yet today's application is no longer a single application. They are a mesh of microservices that must be rapidly scalable, highly agile and adaptive, accessible from anywhere, with robust security built in. In the next two years, you can expect twice as many applications in your field of operations, and half of them will run with microservices that are highly interconnected and distributed across data centers, SaaS or hosted on top of IaaS/PaaS services.

While cloud has accelerated innovation for the business, it has also introduced enormous complexity for IT. A single, highly controlled corporate environment has been blown out across multiple clouds. And with the pandemic, most customers are accelerating their journey to cloud. The new de-facto IT is a multicloud and application centric world bursting at the seams with complexity.

This takes us to the second reason this industry recognition reinforces our focus in cloud.  It shines a light on what Cisco has done to help companies make the transition to cloud. We are uniquely positioned to help customers simplify across all their cloud operations and achieve the ultimate business KPI -an awesome user experience. Cisco has been leading the industry in networking and security for decades, and we are bringing this heritage to radically simplify cloud operations.

We bridge across all our customers' applications in the data center, edge, public cloud and SaaS, and make it easier to deliver the experience you want with consistent operations across applications and infrastructure. We offer agile platforms that bring IT operations and development together, taking into account your existing tools and investments, with a centralized approach that works across all your hybrid IT environments. As a cloud neutral provider running cloud native platforms, we help our customers maintain an open environment and benefit from continuous innovation.2

At Cisco, we help customers simplify cloud in five key areas:

1. Deploy an observable, cloud-native, app-centric software stack that allows developers to innovate faster and deliver an experience users will love.
2. Easily and securely connect distributed users, mobile users, and applications across branches, data centers and every cloud (SaaS, IaaS, cloud service provider, colocation) to achieve a seamless and secure application experience.
3. Maintain seamless security, governance and control across user devices, networks, clouds and applications.
4. Establish a cloud operations model that marries the speed of cloud with the security and reliability of on-premises consistently across your hybrid IT environment.
5. Empower a distributed workforce for business resiliency, with seamless access to their applications and high-quality collaborative experiences, anywhere.

This is just the first phase of our cloud experience strategy, focused on IT simplicity. You can pick up more insights about how Cisco can help you simplify your cloud in this overview. And later this year, we will expand on investments we're making to enable developers through our application networking and application security strategy, as well as to help customers transition to more as-a-service consumption models. We expect an exciting year of ground-breaking innovation to simplify cloud through 2021 and plan to play an even bigger role as one of the coolest cloud companies.