Today's Cisco announcements illustrate the momentum we've seen thus far for Cisco's approach to cloud. Partners across the globe are very eager to engage and understand what roles they can play to help them meet their customer's needs for choice, flexibility, security, and compliance. As more clouds connect, opportunities for our partners to extend value and become more relevant with their customers increase.

Cisco's approach has always been partner-centric. And with Intercloud, partners have even more opportunities to be cloud builders, providers, resellers, consultants, Independent Software Vendors (ISV) and more. The foundation for Cisco's Intercloud is built on:

• A hybrid cloud model to place and move Virtual Machine (VM) workloads on any cloud
• Application-centric policy control for Chief Information Officers across all IT components and clouds at scale
• Data virtualization at scale, to address the Internet of Everything (IoE) explosion, and
• A network-centric partner ecosystem that provides the most choice and data sovereignty over a vendor direct model

While partner business models vary, I always emphasize that there are many opportunities and multiple roles for Intercloud partners. Intercloud partners will bring important value to the ecosystem with professional services, new offers, Service Level Agreements (SLA), consumption pricing, consolidated billing and much more. They can also enhance their roles and monetize in other ways. For example, Intercloud partners can build and operate private clouds with professional services, which opens up opportunities to create a profitable hybrid IT business model.

The diagram below illustrates some of the many roles partners can play in Intercloud.

Intercloud Providers (left) already deliver public cloud infrastructure services, based upon validated Cisco Powered offers. With the addition of Intercloud Fabric, ACI, Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) and the 9000 switching series, partners become Cisco Powered Intercloud Providers. Intercloud Fabric provides the secure workload portability, while ACI, APIC and the 9K enables consistent policy and orchestration across multiple clouds.

Cloud Builders (top) are partners who use Cisco infrastructure to design, build, and deliver Cisco-centric private clouds to their customers. With Intercloud Fabric embedded, builders can connect their customers' private clouds to the Intercloud. And, as part of the Intercloud, builders can also choose from Cisco's own Cloud Services offers to help them meet customer needs.

Cisco Channel Partners and Aggregators (center) will have opportunities to resell Cisco and Cisco Powered Cloud Services. While, Technology, Application and Software as-a-Service (SaaS) Partners (center, right) will provide unique intellectual property and/or service domain expertise that enable cloud services. In addition partners will also be able to resell Metacloud's private OpenStack clouds as-a-service for either on or off premise environments.

For customers leveraging public clouds (bottom), it's not always easy to move workloads to another cloud environment... either public or private. This is one of the key problems our Intercloud vision solves. As more partners adopt our Intercloud Fabric software, ACI, APIC and 9K, customers will be able to move workloads seamlessly with consistent policy and security as their business evolve.

Our goal is to create a global Intercloud partner ecosystem that delivers many types of cloud services. Ultimately, Intercloud-ready services from all types of ecosystem partners will be available globally to meet customer needs for hybrid IT cloud services that feature portability, security and data sovereignty. Intercloud partners have a huge opportunity to deliver real value and provide choice to customers to meet their hybrid IT needs. It's an exciting journey that is just beginning.

As always, I love to know what you think about the steps we are taking. Please give me your thoughts in the comments section.