(This is part 3 of a 7-part series sharing insights from Cisco partners about the Future of Cloud.)

At CiscoLive!, attendees had the chance to meet with many companies offering cloud services.  Dusten Tornow, Director of Infrastructure Products at OneNeck IT Solutions, shared some of his thoughts on the world of many clouds with me.

OneNeck offers a variety of services related to cloud, everything from basic collocation services to ReliaCloud, the company's infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering.  "ReliaCloud serves as a platform for a host of services that we can run on top of it.  We have a lot of customers migrating their enterprise workloads from on-premises onto ReliaCloud.  Then we provide managed services for them and run the whole infrastructure from start to finish.

OneNeck's focus has been on enterprise workloads that need a high performance cloud.  Their service is a Cisco Powered service, meaning they have gone through a rigorous certification and third-party audit of their offering.  I asked him why OneNeck would choose to offer a service that has such a high bar when there are so many alternatives that don't require an audit.

"When we decided to build out our cloud infrastructure," said Tornow, "we knew that we wanted to align with enterprise vendors like Cisco because their technologies resonant with our customers as being high performance.  They recognize that if they were to go out and build their own cloud, it would likely look and feel a lot like what we've built.  Being able to be transparent with what our equipment is made out of and built upon is a huge advantage for us.

"Using the Cisco Powered reference architecture is a no-brainer.  It's a great place to start."

You can also learn more about how providers are addressing the need for enterprise class services in the latest edition ofUnleashing IT.