New applications and cloud computing are placing new demands on IT infrastructure. The infrastructure needs to be capable of quickly responding to dynamic business priorities and changing market conditions.  Customers require an IT infrastructure that brings the scale, agility, and mission-critical availability the business demands, both today and tomorrow. Hence, the industry is witnessing a movement to integrated infrastructure.  What is integrated infrastructure? Integrated infrastructure combines compute, network, management, and storage technologies to simplify and accelerate application deployment.

The integrated infrastructure segment continues to be one of the fastest growing IT markets. I recently  highlighted that Cisco was the leader in the integrated infrastructure market with leading integrated systems built on top of UCS integrated infrastructure (Cisco UCS, Cisco Nexus, and UCS Director). In fact, in Gartner's inaugural Magic Quadrant report for integrated systems, integrated systems based on UCS integrated infrastructure have been rated in the Leaders Quadrant.  In addition, IDC just released their Q1 2014 Worldwide Quarterly Integrated Infrastructure and Platforms Tracker with UCS integrated infrastructure participating in the top three integrated infrastructure solutions. These results show that innovation and solving customer pain points is still a solid formula for success.

At Cisco, we see the need for application centric and hybrid cloud enabled infrastructure to quickly deploy and dynamically locate workloads. With UCS Integrated Infrastructure and Cisco ACI, customers will be able to automate the provisioning of network, compute, and storage resources. With Cisco Intercloud Fabric, customers can build secure hybrid clouds and extend their existing data center to public clouds as needed and on demand. Both Cisco ACI and Cisco Intercloud fabric help lower costs, simplify infrastructure management, and accelerate the delivery of IT resources.

Today, EMC announced a series of new products and solutions under their "Megalaunch" umbrella. The launch includes major updates to EMC's industry-leading storage platforms. The new VMAX³enterprise data service platform is designed for hybrid clouds by delivering enhanced scalability and agility with data center performance and availability.

I am very excited about the capabilities of UCS integrated infrastructure with ACI, Cisco Intercloud Fabric, and the EMC VMAX³being the foundation for high performance, automated, and trusted hybrid clouds.