Today marks another important milestone in our cloud journey together with Microsoft.

Back in March, Cisco and Microsoft announced a jointly engineered solution for service providers designed to dramatically improve the time to market with hybrid cloud services.  The power of the solution is the combination of Windows Azure Pack with Cisco's Application Centric Infrastructure.  The result is a set of pre-packaged applications libraries that allow service providers to rapidly deploy services, reducing up-front costs and enabling faster time-to-revenue. In addition, the combined solution features automated provisioning, which enables service providers to set up a new tenant in two hours versus 12 when creating a new customer environment -a huge competitive advantage.

Today, one of the major announcements at Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference was the introduction of Microsoft Azure Certified for Hybrid Cloud-a new program designed to support service providers who run the Microsoft platforms in their datacenters and who want to deploy a Microsoft Cloud solution in their own datacenter, or build an Azure-enabled hybrid cloud solution, and monetize their investments. And we're excited to announce that Cisco is the first datacenter infrastructure vendor to participate in the program. As a result, service providers will qualify as "Azure Certified" by deploying the Cisco Cloud Architecture for the Microsoft Cloud Platform.  Azure Certified joins the existing Cisco Powered and Microsoft Cloud OS Network (COSN) programs to bring an unprecedented layer of differentiation and support to cloud providers who are deploying this new cloud platform, and to enable consistency, choice and control to CIOs who are using private, SP and public clouds.

At Cisco, our cloud vision is to build a globally connected network of clouds-the Intercloud.  One of the key tenants of our Intercloud vision is consistency across clouds.  And consistency is at the heart of what Microsoft announced today.

We're excited to partner with Microsoft bring this vision to life.