This week, I'll join my Cisco colleagues and industry peers at Strata + Hadoop World in San Jose. Participating in conferences such as this is one of my favorite parts of my job, because it gives us an opportunity as an industry to share information, learn from each other, and tackle challenges collectively with creative Data and Analytics solutions.

Cisco created an Analytics 3.0 architecture that enables data and analytics solutions in the Data Center, the Cloud, and at the network edge, and has made substantial investments in each of these areas as a company. As we have the opportunity to meet and collaborate at Strata + Hadoop World, the Cisco team can tell you all about our substantial investments in these areas. More importantly, you will hear about how Cisco is delivering solutions in partnership with innovative companies who are leaders in big data, analytics and business intelligence.

Speaking of innovative partnerships, today, I am excited to share the announcement of a joint Data Warehouse Optimization solution with Informatica. The solution provides a single platform for offloading processing and storage from data warehouses to Hadoop and enables organizations the ability to integrate and analyze more data and types of data. If you are attending the conference this week, I encourage you to visit the Cisco booth (#831) to hear more about this exciting new solution.

By bringing the best software, hardware and services from Cisco together with innovative and market leading capabilities of our partners, Cisco is enabling powerful solutions to the very real data problems our customers are facing. Data Virtualization is a key part of Analytics 3.0, because it allows you to connect multiple different data sources, make all the data appear as if it's all in one spot, and serve it up with a consistent shape and format to an application and eventually to an end user. Take data from traditional data warehouses, Hadoop clusters, lots of edge places and make it all look to an application like its sitting in the data center in one central data base. This also saves application developers from re-writing applications to take advantage of data that lives at the edge. They can simply write applications as they always have and we can pull that data together wherever it lives -all across the network, in the cloud, and between clouds. Powerful on its own...even more powerful together with our partners.

Data Virtualization brings together data from across your company, multiple clouds, and public data sources. With all of that data available, you can apply analytics to provide rich insights into your customers, your business, and your ability to market products more effectively. Increasingly, the most powerful analytics solutions will have a real-time element, and using Cisco hardware and software to provide analytics on streaming data will enable these real-time scenarios in a way that only Cisco can.

A complete data and analytics strategy will include data in the cloud, the data warehouse, big data stores, and streaming data at the edge. This week, I'll share how Cisco is enabling Analytics 3.0 for our customers and look forward to collaborating with and learning from other thought leaders and innovators.

You can also hear more about how Cisco is collaborating with some of the world's most innovative companies, please watch our webcast on February 24^that 9:00 am Pacific. My colleagues from Cisco will be joined by executives from Splunk, Platfora, SAP and SAS.

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Learn More from My Colleagues

Check out the blogs of Mala Anand, Bob Eve and Nicola Villa to learn more.