(This is part 2 of a 7-part series sharing insights from Cisco partners about the Future of Cloud.)

Chris Kemmerer, Director, Mobility Solutions, Verizon, had a lot to share with me at CiscoLive! "What I'm seeing this year is very transformational," said Kemmerer. "What we're seeing is how to take some of these foundation services and layer applications and more value on top of them.

"For example, our Cisco Powered hosted collaboration service has been very successful as we see the market shifting from premises-based phone services to cloud-base phone systems. Our traditional focus in the cloud space has been infrastructure as a service (IaaS). We've taken the underlying infrastructure of our IaaS platform and started to layer applications to provide software as a service (SaaS) on top of that with some key partners."

Organizations can benefit greatly from these value-added services. "Why put your communications in the cloud? I think customers learn very quickly about the speed with which they can execute in a reliable, responsible manner. When customers are looking to stand up new locations, in the old days, it would be a month or two just for planning. Now we're doing it in weeks."

However, not all clouds are created equal. "Being a carrier, there's an expectation from our customers that we are five 9s reliable, however you want to calculate that," said Kemmerer. "The way we look at it, when we say we're providing an enterprise-class service, it's going to be over an application-aware network. It's going to be secure. It's going to offer SLAs. These are the things that, in my mind, are going to differentiate our services from say a commodity or best effort service."

You can also learn more about how providers are addressing the need for enterprise class services in the latest edition of Unleashing IT.