As I've written in previous blogs, Cisco and AWS continue to do fantastic work together, making it easier for our mutual customers to accelerate their cloud journeys. In this blog, I'd like to take a moment to look back on the relationship-sharing that AWS recently received the Cisco 2020 Ecosystem Partner of the Year award-and also take a look forward by highlighting one of our newest jointly developed offers, Cisco SD-WAN integrated with AWS Transit Gateway.

Cisco 2020 Ecosystem Partner of the Year Goes to AWS

With more than 60,000 Cisco partners worldwide, it's no small feat to be named Cisco's Ecosystem Partner of the Year. To put it mildly, the competition is fierce, because Cisco has so many outstanding ecosystem partners.

Potential winners are evaluated on three criteria:

• Innovation:the quality of innovation in their FY20 solutions and their work with Cisco to help our mutual customers realize true value and achieve successful business outcomes
• Growing the business:how impressively a partner has helped meet customer use case challenges en route to building substantial year-over-year profitable growth.
• Alignment with and commitment to Cisco:how well a partner actively transformed its business to align with Cisco's strategy.

Regarding alignment and commitment, I think the market is catching on to the fact that Cisco and AWS are partnering across a broad range of areas, inspiring and building ever more trust with secure, reliable, and market-leading solutions that simplify on-premises and cloud environments. As an example, my post Four Ways AppDynamics Gives Your AWS Applications a Competitive Edge describes how we help our mutual customers with their application performance management needs.

Extending Enterprise WAN to AWS with Cisco SD-WAN

Another area gaining considerable traction in the market is Cisco and AWS joint development that enables companies to extend their enterprise WANs to AWS Transit Gateway by utilizing Cisco's market-leading SD-WAN solution.

Cisco SD-WAN provides a secure, cloud-scale architecture designed to meet the complex needs of modern WANs through three key functional areas: advanced application optimization, multilayered security, and automated branch-to-cloud extension. AWS Transit Gateway enables customers to easily extend connectivity across thousands of Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (Amazon VPCs), AWS accounts, and on-premises networks to a single gateway.

This integration of Cisco SD-WAN and AWS Transit Gateway fundamentally enables enterprises to improve network connectivity and security for their AWS-based workloads, while also leveraging AWS Transit Gateway to route and secure network traffic.

Going Forward

Going forward, we see the time is ripe for market acceleration. Why do I say this?

First, enterprises across the globe have a strong sense of urgency around transforming their on-premises network architecture into a fully connected cloud-based system as part of their digitization efforts. And the results are remarkable. For example, in a recent study, McKinsey noted that companies have made changes necessitated by the COVID pandemic 20 to 25 times faster than they would have been able to do before digital adoption.

Second, technology integrations are in place with AWS, as documented extensively by AWS and Cisco. As an example, the native integration between Cisco SD-WAN and AWS Transit Gateway is providing a stepping-stone to true cloud-based digital transformation.

Third, co-selling is accelerating across the ecosystem of system integrators, value-added reseller channel partners, and born-in-the-cloud ISVs as they bring to market ecosystem-led solutions that incorporate Cisco technologies and AWS cloud properties to better meet customer use case requirements. Amazon and Cisco are doubling down to assist in this go to market and route to market acceleration, aligning with this partner ecosystem while also transforming the procurement experience through AWS Marketplace. We're investing in the partnerships that help ensure end-customers are aware of and taking advantage of the amazing technology and commercial relationships we have put in place.

Want to learn more? Visit cisco.com/go/aws.