I live in the Hill Country outside Austin where one of our local storytellers, Shake Russell, wrotea song for the Texas sesquicentennial in which he proclaims, "Cotton is King." He subsequently amends it to say, "Cattle is King," followed by "Oil is King," before finally settling on "Willie is King."

I cannot dispute his nod to Saint Willie, but I feel safe updating Shake's econ lesson to point out that in 2016, even out here in the boonies,Cloud is King

Case in point: My neighbor, who spends more time on a tractor than a smartphone, is using sensors to track body temperatures of his prized Longhorns via the Cloud as they roam across his 100+ acres. He's not an early adopter or some tech guru; he has never even heard of IoT. He just likes the sensors "because they
attach to the cows' ears" -a huge improvement over the old way of taking their temperature.

I'm certain the cows prefer it as well.

I bring this up because of some interesting data we gathered at SAP Sapphire about just how mainstream Cloud adoption has become. We surveyed over 400 attendees about how they planned to deploy their next SAP HANA project. 68 said on appliances, 85 said via TDI, and a whopping 257 -over 60%-said "in the cloud."

This is great news for Cisco customers because we have quietly become the benchmark infrastructure provider for simple and secure SAP Cloud hosting. In fact, 7 of the top 10 SAP Global Hosting Providers identified in the SAP Partner Guide have deployed their SAP infrastructure on UCS.   Surprised? Check out the dozen testimonials we have from certified SAP Cloud Hosters. Here are a few excerpts:

• "As more enterprises move SAP to the cloud, we needed a partner that could help us expand our share of this rapidly growing market." -Stacy Hayes, VP Strategic Partnerships,Virtustream

• "With Cisco infrastructure, we can deliver high-availability solutions with industry-leading uptime."-Pat O'Day, CTO,Bluelock

• "Combining our expertise with Cisco infrastructure, we can drive new innovations for our customers." -Vladimir Mlynar, CTO,AxiansICT Austria GmbH

• "Cisco changed our mindset and offered exactly what we needed in order to get to our goal, which is automation and reduced time to market." -Martin Stratmann, Managing Director, Oetker Daten und Informationsverarbeitung (OEDIV)

• "Cisco is our trusted partner and a global partner of SAP, helping us keep customer satisfaction high." -Steve Short, Senior Vice President of Managed Services,intelligence

• "By combining our expertise with Cisco technology, we can deliver innovative services across the globe." -Umesh Gowda, Director of Business Development, Sourcing Advisory & ICT Relations,T-SystemsNorth America

If these leading hosting companies bet their SAP cloud infrastructure -and consequently their business -on Cisco UCS, maybe you should consider us for your next SAP cloud project?

Meanwhile back in Texas, Willie has ditched the expensive satellite connection on his biodiesel bus and replaced it with a set of wireless data cards from a variety of providers and fused them into a single connection for fast, mobile, inexpensive access to the internet wherever and whenever he's on the road again.  You can find that story out on the cloud -but don't search for "Willie Nelson and IoT."  Google will assume you made a typo.