It can be a tough world out there for a cloud provider. You're facing stiff competition from the big cloud players like Amazon and Google to deliver more flexible cloud services. But you have an edge that they don't. Customers can trust you to deliver guaranteed reliability, security, and data sovereignty for business-critical applications in a way that pure public cloud providers can't match.

To capitalize on that trust, you need to:

• Offer a suite of public, private, and hybrid cloud solutions "as a service," and bring them to market fast
• Deliver business-class performance (scalability, flexibility, reliability and security, and more) against customer SLAs
• Support key hybrid cloud capabilities like workload portability; and security, policy, and infrastructure management across clouds
• Deliver globally while retaining data sovereignty

There are technologies available to do all of that, but typically you'd need to spend a lot of time and money knitting together hardware and software from multiple vendors. Then you'd have to test them to make sure they work together, and you could encounter a lot of complexity deploying and provisioning new services.

But there's good news: Cisco and Microsoft have teamed up to create the next-generation architecture for cloud providers. It's called the Cisco Cloud Architecture for the Microsoft Cloud Platform. And it's going to make capturing the cloud opportunity a whole lot easier for you and your customers.

Introducing Cisco Cloud Architecture for the Microsoft Cloud Platform

Cisco Cloud Architecture for the Microsoft Cloud Platform combines Cisco's world-class hardware with Microsoft's enterprise-ready software to help you build comprehensive hybrid cloud solutions-faster, more easily, and more profitably. It's part of a multi-year agreement between two of the world's hybrid cloud heavyweights, Cisco and Microsoft, to deliver joint engineering, product development, and go-to-market support.

Cisco Cloud Architecture for the Microsoft Cloud Platform is the result of a shared vision about how the cloud needs to work for businesses. We know that if you're going to deliver viable cloud solutions to your customers private, public, and hybrid clouds need to work together seamlessly. And they need to be a lot easier to deploy and operate.

Cisco Cloud Architecture for the Microsoft Cloud Platform maps application policy to infrastructure policy for Microsoft and third-party ISV applications. And it implements our Unified Data Center and Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) with Microsoft Windows Azure Pack (WAP) as part of a complete, pre-tested and validated, ready-to-deploy cloud platform. So you can deploy new applications and services at DevOps speed, with lifecycle support from the partners you trust.

Check out this video for an overview:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMcsKBx-aS0

A Smarter Way to Grow Your Cloud Portfolio

The deep integration of Cisco and Microsoft technologies in Cisco Cloud Architecture for the Microsoft Cloud Platform lets you go beyond traditional IaaS to deliver IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS solutions from a single platform. You can offer a full range of new cloud services-network services, disaster recovery, Big Data, enterprise applications, and more-faster and more easily.

By combining Microsoft System Center 2012 R2 with Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS) Manager, Cisco Cloud Architecture for the Microsoft Cloud Platform simplifies management and operations to lower costs. And with our complementary go-to-market programs (Cisco Powered and Microsoft Azure Certified for Hybrid Cloud), you can bring new cloud services to market with lower upfront investment and less risk.

Drawing on the combined strengths of Cisco and Microsoft, Cisco Cloud Architecture for the Microsoft Cloud Platform gives you:

• Greater flexibility and confidence in deploying cloud apps and services:Deliver best-in-class hybrid, IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS services enabled by joint product-level engineering, testing, and validation from Cisco and Microsoft.
• Faster time to market:Use pretested service templates and protocols that are built into the solution to provision new services in minutes.
• Increased profit potential:Reduce TCO and improve margins with operational simplicity and control, and grow your business with Cisco and Microsoft joint go-to-market support.Want to know more? Join Cisco and Microsoft at the Cisco Knowledge Network talk "Delivering Cloud on Your Terms: Introducing the Cisco Powered Architecture for the Microsoft Cloud Platform."

Want to learn more, watch our on-demand webcast.