Over the past year, Cisco has been  increasingly vocal and active around open source solutions .
One of my favorite blogger, Omar Sultan , spent a lot of time writing on the subject , starting with OpenStack (ie blog :OpenStack cisco ONE and you) -You may want to check all his  blogs here
Cisco also has a blog dedicated to this topic "Open at Cisco"
Last June   Cisco Shashi Kiran  announced theCisco ONE(Open Networking Environment)  on Cisco blog, and last week at Gartner DC , both David Yen , SVP & GM Data Center Group , and John Manville SVP Cisco IT Global Infrastructure talk about what Cisco ONE means in terms of solutions and IT platform for us and our customers .

Lew Tucker ,Cisco VP , Chief Technology Officer for Cloud Computing and Vice Chairman OpenStack foundation is obviously one of the force behind the evolution of the data center . Actually Lew was recently recognized as one of the top ten pioneers in the cloud computing emergence by InformationWeek .
Watch Lew Tucker talking about innovation and open source in this short video

On December 11 webcast , Shashi Kiran will moderate a conversation between Lew Tucker and Raj Patel

Lew Tucker, Chief Technology Officer of Cloud Computing at Cisco, will provide an overview of OpenStack, its origins, benefits, and why Cisco is involved in this community effort.

Raj Patel, Vice President, Cloud Services at Cisco, will discuss the strategic decision-and results to date-of choosing OpenStack as the cloud platform for Cisco WebEx, the market-leading Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) collaboration solutions.

Topics to be covered include:

?  An introduction to OpenStack, and highlights of the latest release of OpenStack (Folsom), including self-service provisioning in multi-tenant networks

?  The role of open network programmability in achieving the full potential of the cloud

?  The benefits that customers can expect from OpenStack as part of their cloud initiatives

?  How WebEx architects significantly accelerated new product releases with OpenStack, and improved both operational efficiency and infrastructure resiliency

?  The status of OpenStack standardization and the growing OpenStack development community

?  How OpenStack relates to Cisco's Open Network Environment (or Cisco ONE), the OpenStack Quantum project, Software-Defined Networking (SDN), and OpenFlow

?  How Cisco is enabling customers to take an evolutionary approach to OpenStack

To register now for this unique webcast click here 

I hope to see you amongst the attendants.