Cisco partners have told us multiple times that the Virtualization Experience Infrastructure (VXI) continues to be the Gold standard for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). We appreciate your input. At the same time, we know there's more we can do to help you.

So we're happy to share with you that a new release of VXI comes out today. What does this mean for you?

Let's have a look first at what's new, how this meets your customers' demands, and then how that applies to your business.

First, key to the announcement is an opportunity for partners to now offer Cisco's collaborative services, enabled by Cisco Jabber. This means customers can select the work style most suited to their needs: mobile, fixed, and now virtual. Cisco Jabber for virtual environments is enabled by Cisco Virtualization Experience Media Engine (VXME), a new software component that delivers high-definition video and voice communications to be integrated as part of a virtual desktop session.

Why is this important for your customers?

At a recent CIO forum, what intrigued me was the feedback on what a Unified Workspace strategy should look like for them. Here's what I learned:

1. The Cisco Validated design is critical for reducing risk and lowering time to value of the solution, together with reduced Opex and Capex. But we should never lose sight that integration of technology is not an objective as such-it's a means to achieve something else.
2. CIO's mandate an opportunity to unlock business value by delivering a Unified Workspace strategy.
3. Their conclusion: this is not so much about us as this is about the user, so we need to jointly sell them the story.

With this in mind, how can this new release help you? And why is it important to know your audience?

With this announcement, partners can now evolve their VXI investment into an offer unique to the industry, which will help redefine your customers' workspace experience. This increases your long-term selling opportunities, because the software strategy allows you to land and expand-and move customers into new capabilities for the same user group or new use cases with software protection.

Want more good news? VXI leverages our partners' investment in intelligent network services as Cisco VXI becomes the first desktop virtualization solution to integrate network-based Quality of Service (QoS). And there are 200,000 Cisco Collaboration customers with substantial installed base upgrade opportunities. Loading HD video/voice on virtual workspace increases the pull through of cross-architecture products and services. Finally, the release streamlines partner ordering and support for the integrated Cisco and third-party components through Solutions +.

It's important that we keep the user experience in mind. You can do this by identifying opportunities to virtualize the desktop and the voice and video experience at the same time. The focus should be to enable use cases with virtualized voice and video as a critical component in the business process, not just as a "nice to have" feature. As indicated in Fabrice Della Mea's blog, different use cases require different user experiences.

Every employee has the consumer apps to place a "good enough" video call. But when a voice/video call is intrinsically linked to a business outcome, this becomes a different matter.  When it's critical for the business, customers need a partner they can rely upon.

In the end, all users seem to care about is speed and ease of use. If the workspace experience is faster and improves intangibles within the business environment such as reachability, collaboration enablement, and agility, then this is good news-and all trump TCO reduction.

In summary, know your audience and the business care-abouts. This will give you an opportunity to become a trusted advisor in redefining the workspace experience.

Meanwhile, Cisco continues its commitment to support you in effectively selling with resources such as VXI Partner Accelerator, business