If you had a chance to check out the Cisco Global Cloud Index, it's no real surprise that data center traffic will nearly triple over the next five years and cloud traffic will nearly quadruple. Customers want cloud solutions to lower cost, speed up IT services delivery, and create business agility-but they don't necessarily want to do it all themselves.

For our channel partners, building data centers and private clouds has become a significant part of their business. In fact, we've seen exponential growth from partners who are building private clouds to help customers create a hybrid cloud environment, where using private and public clouds helps lower IT cost and increase capacity.

Cisco is committed to providing our partners with the tools they need to meet the needs of their customers, including integrated infrastructure stacks for private cloud builders. I'm excited about our most recent announcement of VersaStack with IBM. This new offering as well as our integrated offerings with NetApp, VCE/EMC, and Red Hat enables our partners to build and operate secure and policy-driven hybrid cloud environments for their customers.

In this new hybrid world, customers will need their partners to help manage workloads and migrate applications on and off public clouds. So, cloud builders who offer professional services to build and operate hybrid IT environments have substantial new revenue opportunities.

For example, in the holiday season, many retailers need additional IT capacity but don't want to invest in more in-house compute, storage and network resources. In a hybrid environment, partners with a cloud, or Hybrid IT practice can help their customers leverage public clouds quickly and securely to meet these short term needs.

Ultimately, the cloud builder's professional services team becomes a trusted advisor to the customer helping build their cloud strategy. This allows customers to leverage their in-house private clouds with external public clouds to make the most of a hybrid IT environment.

Are you a private cloud builder? If so, I want to hear what you think, and learn about how you are helping your customers create a hybrid IT environment.