Five years ago, VCE was created with the goal of providing a simple, efficient solution to deploy and run IT infrastructure. VCE's Vblock Systems have enabled customers to focus on business innovation instead of integrating, validating, and managing IT infrastructure. It would be an understatement to say VCE has been successful.  Last year, Vblock Systems, built on Cisco UCS integrated infrastructure, surpassed their 2013 goal of$1 billion in annual sales and was recognized as a leader inthe integrated infrastructure market. In fact, in Gartner's inaugural Magic Quadrant for integrated systems, VCE Vblock Systems is rated in the Leaders Quadrant, based on the tight integration of industry and market leading technologies from Cisco and EMC.

Today, VCE announced a major update and expansion to their Vblock Systems portfolio using the latest Cisco UCS servers and Cisco ACI-Ready switches. The new Cisco M4 model servers recently celebrated four world-records benchmarks, offering performance improvements up to 145 percent since the last processor generation. Customers can be confident that Cisco UCS servers will deliver outstanding application performance as part of a Vblock System. IT leaders want to accelerate infrastructure and application deployment and these new ACI-Ready Vblock Systems are an extension of Cisco's application-centric data center strategy. We feel our application-centric approach, where the automated configuration of IT infrastructure in sync with the needs of the application, is essential to keeping pace with todays dynamic business priorities.

VCE also announced a cloud management solution with Cisco UCS Director.  VCE's Integrated Solution for Cloud Management with Cisco pre-integrates UCS Director with a Vblock System, providing the capability to quickly instantiate an initial private cloud foundation for customer environments. UCS Director enables the automation and provisioning of compute, network, and storage resources, both physical and virtual. This automation of integrated infrastructure can further expedite the deployment of application-ready infrastructure.

Cisco is excited that our new products and technologies have been integrated into the Vblock portfolio and congratulate the VCE team on today's announcement. We believe these new Vblock Systems and solutions will make it easier for customers to deliver the performance, agility, and availability for the most demanding applications.