Customers' expectations have never been higher. They want choice and flexibility. They require intelligent networks and infrastructure that's intuitive, secure, easy to use and manage, and able to adapt to the specific requirements of their applications.

Today we're excited to announce Cisco ONE Software, which offers a simplified solution to the most relevant, frequently-used customer scenarios in the data center, wide area network and local access networks. Cisco ONE is a big deal, and it's an important piece of our larger software strategy in a world where value is increasingly delivered to customers through software.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sCTjsnpuMc

Think about the technology disruptions and market transitions our customers are experiencing today. Cloud, virtualization, big data, software-defined networking, software-as-a-service (SaaS), the Internet of Everything - software is the enabling mechanism at the heart of each. In recent years, software has played an increasingly key role in our technology and solutions. Today, we are the fifth-largest software company in terms of software revenues, and the third-largest SaaS provider.

And our software business is growing fast. As we deliver more capabilities, software becomes a critical component that pulls our systems and architectures together into solutions for our customers. Our customers want to more effectively capture and realize value from IT across their business. We're enabling that with a software strategy built on four principles:

User Experience First

Our customers are looking for simplicity and business results. This requires focus on the end-to-end customer experience with the product -from trial and purchase through use, support and adoption. Cisco will focus on providing an intuitive and immersive experience that delights our customers.

Everything Cloud Ready

Our customers are looking for choice -on premise, cloud and hybrid. We enable them on this journey by delivering capabilities for them to easily, securely and simply operate across heterogeneous environments.

Simple and Open

Real simplicity begins with automation. That's why our application aware software capability (ACI) is so important across our offerings. In addition, we are investing and extending open source platforms.

Consumption Flexibility

Customers have a choice to buy and consume software that is flexibly tailored to their budget and investment strategy.

We're making tremendous progress towards executing our strategy with these principles. For example, our customers' user experience has been a major focus across our new collaboration product launches, such as Project Squared.  Regarding cloud readiness, we're integrating some of our core cloud capabilities such as Intercloud Fabric and security into our software platforms such as Cisco ONE. Network Analytics, within Cisco's Connected Analytics portfolio, helps customers extract value from data generated by rapidly expanding ecosystem of people, process, data and things. In addition, with Cisco ONE we have enabled consumption flexibility that makes it easy for a customer to choose between perpetual or subscription software licensing. Also, for customers who want to consume networking as a service via cloud-managed IT, our Cisco Meraki offer is available globally.

And let's not forget DevNet-an online resource launched in 2013 providing developers with rich APIs, software development kits and other tools to create new applications to run on our software platforms such as our global Intercloud.

As we accelerate our conversations with customers on multiple fronts, we'll continue to see software play a critical role. There are also tremendous opportunities for our partners, which you can learn more about by reading our Partner Blog here.

What do you think about the impact of software and Cisco's strategy?  Let me know in the comments below. I look forward to sharing more updates.