Having been part of the team who developed the Cisco Cloud Enablement Services, our professional services to help customers enable and adopt cloud computing, I was absolutely delighted watching the CiscoLive! keynote yesterday to hear Padmasree Warrior announce the results of the March 2013 IDC market research study that showed Cisco come out on top for cloud professional services [Source: "2013 U.S. Professional Services Opportunities Related to Cloud Services", IDC Doc#239862, March 2013].

In this survey, as  the chart below shows (reproduced with the kind permission of IDC), respondents indicated that Cisco professional services were used most often across all of the three cloud categories that IDC measured: cloud applications, cloud application platforms, and cloud infrastructure.  Ahead of Accenture, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle/Sun, HP and others.

I first blogged on the challenges of adopting cloud almost exactly 3 years ago, based upon our early experiences in delivering cloud professional services.  We've not rested since then, continuously innovating our services and capabilities, preparing for the exiting years ahead.  For example, over the past 6 months, we've introduced the Cisco DomainTen^SMframework for cloud and data center transformation.  If you follow my blogs, you'll see that that I've discussed the data center challenges across the diverse range of domains ranging from Facilities and Infrastructure, Automation and Orchestration, Applications and Operational Process and Governance.  We offer services to help our customers in each of these ten domains.  We're no longer deploying just individual hardware technologies.  We're helping our customers address their business challenges in complex solution areas including cloud computing, secure virtual desktops, application migration and software defined networking (SDN).  It's both humbling and terrific to see our success, witnessed by the IDC survey discussed above, but most importantly across our customer base as we help them benefit from data center transformation.  And it's also terrific to see how Cisco Services is helping more and more companies choose Cisco as their IT partner of choice -all part of Cisco's journey to be the#1 IT company.