Everything about the data center today has changed, driven by the applications that run in it. Today's data center apps have undergone a fundamental architecture shift from monolithic, shrink-wrapped packages to a collection of microservices that are assembled and reassembled in a continuous development cycle. The people who rely on and even manage these apps have diversified too, from just the IT organizations to many different lines of businesses and users who are exerting both influence and budget toward self-determination and self-service models.

Even where the apps reside has changed. They are no longer confined to single, fixed locations and are instead distributed across both on-premise data centers as well as public and hybrid clouds. For enterprises, this trend not only increases management complexity but also makes it more challenging to mitigate real-time security threats.

The good news for enterprises and our partners is that Cisco is ahead of this curve as the only company capable of delivering a comprehensive architecture with breakthrough innovation at all levels of the data center stack -from infrastructure resources, policy-based management/automation, and best-of-breed hybrid cloud orchestration. A summary of our Partner Summit announcements includes:

Cisco HyperFlex? Systems: Based on UCS, Cisco is unveiling the next generation of the hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), which simplifies policy-based automation across network, compute and storage. HyperFlex offers the utmost in flexibility and simplicity, giving customers the ability to stand up a system from ground up and add scale/performance in less than an hour versus days or weeks;

New Cisco Nexus 9000 Switches:  Next-generation data center switches from the Nexus 9k family that deliver cloud scale and give Cisco customers a two-year innovation advantage over competitive technology in terms of performance, scale and security;

Hybrid Cloud orchestration: comprehensive yet simplified, orchestration for both on-premise as well as hybrid cloud workloads along with complete application lifecycle management. By combining Cisco ACI and UCS platforms with storage solutions from industry leaders, the Cisco Cloud Center, has created an industry-leading solution that automates and optimizes end-to-end provisioning for hybrid clouds from a single pane of glass.

Market disruption through continued innovation

These announcements will be an integral part of another technology transition that Cisco is driving in the enterprise and data center landscape through disruptive innovation.

This began with voice/video/data convergence over IP networks, which established new benchmarks for IT cost savings and resource utilization. Cisco then led to the convergence of the virtualized IT compute/network/ storage stack, driving new levels of agility and creating new IT operating models. Following this, Cisco paved the way toward the Application Economy using the scale, security and programmability of the Cisco ACI and other software-defined solutions.

With this latest technology transition, Cisco is enabling enterprises to future-proof their data centers and hybrid cloud environments through real-time analytics, hyperconverged platforms, and cloud-scale capacity that give them the freedom to dynamically choose any combination of on-premise data centers, public or hybrid cloud environments to run their apps.

For our partners, the message is simple: we cannot achieve success without you. The quality of our "better together" partnerships are key to helping Cisco stand out among our peers and competitors. In turn, our partners have access to highly differentiated innovations that only Cisco can deliver including the broadest portfolio of industry-leading compute, network, storage, software and orchestration solutions available today. Partners also have access to Cisco's unique ability to drive common policies and intelligent automation wherever data center apps reside, which eliminates customers having to make difficult and binary "on-prem or cloud" decisions. This is the core value proposition of our announcements today.

Joining us in this journey will further help you, our partners, create new revenue streams and stand out from competitors. Just as importantly though, this will prepare you to give your customers great service as you help them pave their way into the next decade toward the seamless adoption of hybrid cloud-enabled data centers.