In today's always on and connected,Internet of Thingsenvironments,IT is taking center stage to optimize business operations.

Many IT organizations allocate 70% or more of their budgets to simply keeping their operations up and running. It's been like this for a long time, andthere are many good arguments for this approach. After all, when IT stops working, business grinds to a halt. The penalty for failing to keeping things moving is often swift and unpleasant.

At the same time, most CIOs will admit that they are increasingly being pulled in several directions at once. In addition to keeping the uptime ball in the air, as a CIO you must juggle an accelerating onslaught of new demands. Like the push towardsvideo, mobile, data analytics, andcloud. Plus the exponential increase in Internettrafficthat means your networks never seem to be fast enough. And no IT executive wants to see their organization on the evening news in connection with the latest data security breach.

As a CIO, you should be asking your IT vendors how they can help reverse the 70-30 ratio in your shop without downgrading its performance. How do you transition to spending less on day-to-day operations? And, what's the best way to direct a bigger share of IT resources toward addressing the expanding needs of the internal lines of business with more innovative solutions?

Changing the IT operating model to increase efficiencies and support a more agile, lean approach is the most important objective for most enterprises and service providers. WithCisco Data Centerproducts,solutions, and services, we work with you to develop policies and operating models to take better advantage of emerging architectures and service management capabilities.

In my interview withEnterprise Executive, we discuss the specifics of how Cisco can help. How we are moving beyond software defined networking (SDN)to simplify both disparate and converged technologies, including servers, storage, and the network. We explore how Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) is expanding virtualization to include applications, enabling the management of the entire network infrastructure through a single administrative plane. I cite examples of how Cisco's own IT organization is realizing impressive gains in operating efficiencies while delivering applications more quickly.

Cisco can assist in your journey from merely "keeping the lights on," to freeing up IT resources to focus on innovation, and assuming your rightful strategic role in driving the business at the speed of the market.