It's hard to believe it was only eight weeks ago that I announced Cisco's$1B investment in a bold Intercloud strategy to 10,000 partners and colleagues in Las Vegas..

Today, Cisco announced additional Intercloud partners and offerings, and on the main stage at our 25^thanniversaryCisco Live!event in San Francisco this morning, I'll demonstrate how fast we've been able to move by driving a partner-centric Cloud strategy.

FYI: You can watch my keynote on theCisco Live web site.

Our customers have been asking Cisco to expand beyond our hosted collaboration and SaaS offerings (such as WebEx, Meraki and Cisco Cloud Web Security) with a richer set of cloud services. Today, in San Francisco, we are announcing a substantial expansion of those services with new infrastructure-as-a-service offerings and cloud disaster recovery applications that leverage the cloud platforms of new Intercloud partners Dimension Data and Sungard Availability Services. They join Telstra as our first Intercloud partners.

Simplifying the creation of hybrid cloud environments is also top of mind with our customers. In Las Vegas, I discussed how our Intercloud Fabric already enables CIOs to move data and applications between public or private clouds easily and securely. Today we have announced that thousands of customers on VCE's Vblock converged infrastructure systems, and NetApp's FlexPod converged infrastructure solution, will be able to seamlessly design their private cloud as an on-ramp to the Intercloud.

Our customers also want help addressing rising data sovereignty concerns with more localized cloud nodes. Today, Johnson Controls becomes an Intercloud partner, bringing to customers a pioneering modular data center managed solution. This will help customers add localized data center capacity wherever they need it, in a way that is seamlessly interoperable with the Cisco Cloud.

When you consider we previously announced the support and partnership of Telstra, Allstream, Canopy, Ingram Micro, Logicalis Group, MicroStrategy, OnX Managed Services, and Wipro for our Intercloud strategy, we're truly moving at 'cloud speed'. And it's really just the beginning.

In the past 60 days, we have fortified our cloud leadership team with the appointment of Nick Earle, Faiyaz Shahpurwala and Dr. Gee Rittenhouse to lead cloud sales and go-to-market, services and engineering, respectively. This team is comprised of more than 3,700 Cisco employees who are driving the execution of our cloud strategy. We also tapped our long-time channel chief Edison Peres to run our cloud and managed services partner organization.  And we have attracted outstanding cloud talent to join us from Amazon Web Services, AT&T, Microsoft, IBM, Savvis and Yahoo!

It's worth highlighting that the momentum we have established as the#1 provider of infrastructure solutions for cloud providers continues. Today, we announced that Accenture is joining the more than 400 cloud providers building their clouds on Cisco technology. The world's leading management consulting, technology and outsourcing services firm announced that the Accenture Cloud Platform will leverage Cisco's Intelligent Automation for the Cloud management software to automate the provisioning of client applications and workloads.

Join us virtually at Cisco Live to learn more about how the Intercloud is the platform for the Internet of Everything, or visit: www.cisco.com/go/cloudstrategy