My father taught me at a young age that hard work pays off.   Over the years, this lesson has proven to be true, again and again. 

I reflected on this important lesson this week when new Q1 data from Synergy Research Group showed that Cisco has taken over leadership of the cloud infrastructure equipment market, just one quarter after IBM's share of the market had hit a two-year high.

While market share can certainly fluctuate, the report is a strong testament to the strategy, focus, execution -and yes, hard work -of Cisco's entire cloud team, which has enabled our enterprise and service provider partners to build and deploy best-in-class cloud computing solutions

According to Synergy, the first quarter was an exceedingly poor one for the server market, and as a consequence IBM and HP both took a big hit in cloud infrastructure equipment revenues. Meanwhile Cisco had a very strong quarter in public cloud networking infrastructure, helping it to grab more than 15% share of the overall cloud infrastructure equipment market.

 "Cisco has been steadily and consistently building its share in this market and now finds itself in the leadership position," said Jeremy Duke, Synergy Research Group's founder and Chief Analyst.