The year is about to end, but the hard work of our labor keeps on bearing fruits. From several customer successes at the beginning to Best of Interop mid-year,andnow, we're wrapping up 2016 with two more industry certifications for Cisco Routing platforms: theMEF Carrier Ethernet 2.0 and Miercom Performance Verified.

One Shall Reap What One Sows

What we sow are our relentless commitment to and delivery of network innovations. In return, we reap the attainments of successes by our customers using our innovations. Throughout the year, we witnessed many business transformations enabled by our products and solutions. Many even co-celebrated their wins with us on stage at Cisco Live. See a few highlights for 2016 below. (For a comprehensive list of innovations in Enterprise Network, see Prashanth Shenoy's blogCisco DNA Ushers a New Era.)

Early on, Patrick Drew, Network Infrastructure Manager, shared how Huntington Bank migrated toBank of the Futurewith Cisco Intelligent WAN. Results: 66% cost avoidance and high availability up to 100%. Branch manager's accolade: "Teller application is running great!" View Huntington Bank session video and presentation.

At Cisco Live Las Vegas, Sean Wang, University of British Columbia Network Architect, leveraged network virtualization to deploy virtual firewall and load balancer across a campus of 400 hectares and 200 locations. Sean simplified and scaled the university network up to 10G, automated configurations, and achieved GO GREEN status. View UBC session video and presentation.

Along the way, our innovations were recognized. Also in Las Vegas, we won Best of Interop in several categories:

1. Cisco Enterprise NFV, the first branch virtualization solution for enterprise;
2. Cisco Flexible Radio Assignment, an intelligence-driven, real-time capacity management feature available on Cisco Aironet Wireless Access Points; and
3. Cisco FirePOWER Next Generation Firewall (NGFW), the first threat-focused, fully integrated NGFW with unified policy management.

About two weeks ago, two customers, Under Armour and Adobe, shared how they successfully extended applications to public clouds using Cisco Cloud Services Router 1000V and Transit Virtual Private Cloud solution on AWS. We hit record highs in terms of number of registrations and attendance capacity for this webinar. If you missed the session or wasn't able to login due to capacity limit, watch it on-demand here and test try CSR1000V for free.

And Now, Two New Certifications

MEF Carrier Ethernet 2.0. It is an industry program that certifies compliance with Carrier Ethernet 2.0 standards. Our enterprise and carrier-class routers, the ISR 4000 Series and ASR 1000 Series, got certified among a selected few. Networking Equipment Manufacturer (NEM) goes through an independent lab test of 634 test cases in order to attain such certification. When using an MEF CE 2.0 certified product, customers can rest assure that:

• A-level of services are provided with certified equipment/software.
• Test burden for their organization is reduced.
• Compatibility with other vendors in mixed deployment environment is assured.
• Certified equipment will operate within the published specs for functionality and accuracy.

Miercom Performance Verified. Miercom independent lab test attests to the reliability of network product's claimed performance. This is even more important for software product in the cloud than hardware product. In a shared resource environment like a public or private cloud, load-balancing among virtual machines and virtual network services requires not only high availability, but also horizontal scaling. These capabilities ensure businesses can spin up or down services on-demand (agility) and elastically scale as the application needs expand (flexibility). Following the footstep of the ISR 4000 Series, our Cloud Services Router 1000V is now Miercom Performance Verified for public and private cloud environments.

Some highlights from the CSR1000V Miercom report.

• Using just one or two virtual CPUs (vCPUs) per virtual machine (VM), CSR 1000v delivers outstanding throughput performance -up to physical limit of 20 Gbps on x86 Server and up to 5 Gbps on Amazon Web Services.
• The latest CSR 1000v software we tested delivers up to 40 percent better throughput than the previous version 3.17.
• Benefits to using CSR 1000v became apparent in all scenarios tested -including quick implementation, flexibility, hypervisor agnostic, and IOS XE's familiar configuration and diagnostics tools.

Not so shabby for 2016, wouldn't you say? Stay tuned. In 2017, we have many new innovations and even more customer successes to share. Meanwhile, happy holidays to you and yours.