In 2011, Cisco's Chief Information Officer Rebecca Jacoby established CITEIS, a 'private cloud' designed to more quickly, more flexibly and more cost-effectively give our employees the I.T. resources they need to do their jobs. CITEIS has reduced the time it takes to provision compute, storage and networking from 6-8 weeks to 15 minutes, and by virtualizing more than 92% of our data center environment, we've also reduced the TCO of our I.T. environment by more than 66%.

Those are impressive results, and Rebecca is a world-class CIO, but even her organization isn't attempting to unilaterally keep up with the pace of change -with cloud scale, with global reach, with rapid business service delivery, or with the analytics capability required to derive value from the Internet of Everything.

No one organization can.

Like many of our customers, Rebecca has embraced a hybrid IT model. Cisco increasingly relies on a combination of private cloud and public cloud services. Aggregating, integrating, customizing and securely delivering services based on hundreds of applications from dozens of vendors in public and private clouds has become a critical part of Rebecca's  role.

And this is the reality faced by CIOs all over the world today.  In order to move with speed, scale, global reach and world class economics, they all recognize that 'hybrid cloud' strategies must be embraced.

In the face of this challenge, customers and partners have asked Cisco to do more. And we saw an exciting opportunity to do much more than was being offered in the market by any other cloud provider.

We saw an opportunity to help customers simplify the creation of hybrid cloud environments. We saw an opportunity to expand the portfolio of cloud services we deliver.

We also saw an opportunity to share risk with our customers, resellers and service provider partners by building a global Intercloud  -a network of clouds -that could be leveraged to help partners and service providers bring new services to market more quickly.

Crucially, we saw an opportunity, by building an Intercloud with more national cloud nodes than any rival, to address rising data sovereignty concerns.

I'm incredibly excited that we're going to deliver on all of those promises with Cisco's global Intercloud , which we're announcing today at our worldwide Partner Summit conference, in Las Vegas.This is going to be a cloud unlike any other.

Cisco will invest$1Bn in the next two years to build its expanded cloud business, and we expect the incremental capabilities and investments from our partners to expand the true investment figure even further.

We'll offer an expanded suite of Cisco Cloud Services from a global network of Cisco and partner data centers.

Our cloud will be the world's first truly open, hybrid cloud. The Cisco Intercloud will be built upon industry-leading Cisco cloud technologies and leverage OpenStack for its open standards-based global infrastructure. We plan to support any workload, on any hypervisor and interoperate with any cloud.

And this will be a cloud truly built for the Internet of Everything, capable of scaling to billions of connections, and trillions of events, all supported by real-time analytics to help customers get the insights they need from the connections of people, processes, data and things, as they happen.

Then there's automation and speed of deployment. Cisco 's Intercloud  will leverage Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure to optimize application performance and to make rolling out new services much faster, and to improve application security, compliance, auditing, and mobility.

And we think our reseller and systems integrator partners are going to love this cloud too. We will offer open APIs to enable application and service customization by partners and customers, giving them new opportunities for service differentiation and profitability.

Cisco is also expanding the Cisco Powered program to include Cisco Cloud Services. Cisco will sell these new services through channel partners and directly to end customers. Partners who develop Cisco Powered services can extend their portfolio through new Cisco cloud offers for faster time to market and global scale.

A little later today, I'll be joined for our announcement in Las Vegas by our first Cisco Intercloud partner, Telstra, Inc, the largest service provider in Australia.  Cisco will deploy and run a cloud infrastructure on behalf of Telstra, and Telstra will provide both Cisco and Telstra-specific solutions to customers. This is a great example of how we expect to deliver both local capability and global scale, with unmatched services delivered by Cisco and our partners. And Telstra is just the first of many partners in this venture.  Allstream; Ingram Micro, Logicalis Group; OnX Managed Services, and Wipro  have also announced their support for the Cisco Intercloud today.

Of course, we believe this is going to be good for business. We expect to expand the addressable cloud market for Cisco and our partners from$22Bn to$88Bn between 2013-2017.

This is an exciting day for Cisco and, I believe, a transformational day for CIOs adapting to the world of hybrid clouds and the unprecedented opportunity presented by the Internet of Everything.

We look forward to telling you more in the coming months, and welcome you on this journey with us.

Additional Resources

• Cisco Cloud Services opens New Opportunities for Partners by Bob Gault, VP Cloud and Managed Services Partner Organization
• The Rise of the Intercloud  by Fabio Gori, Director Worldwide Cloud Marketing Cisco
• Cloud Services to Move the Internet of Everything -and the SP Business -Forward, Faster by Doug Webster, VP Global Marketing and Corporate Communication Service Providers Cisco