Here's an amazing fact I heard the other day: global network traffic has grown 16-fold since 2005 -16-fold!  Largely due to the booming popularity of on-demand video, and the explosion of mobile computing including smart phones, tablets, and the Internet of Things, this juggernaut is not going to slow down anytime soon.  Yet, no data center leader I know of has received anywhere near 16 times the budget or staffing levels to keep pace.

I meet frequently with IT executives. What they need the most to keep pace often comes down to one thing: agility.  Agility allows them to meet the organization's needs on demand.  To scale, and to scale fast.  And to create an IT environment designed to quickly adapt to new technology trends, increase efficiency, fuel innovation, unlock intelligence, and minimize risk.

At this year's Cisco Partner Summit we announced Cisco Global Intercloud, and at Interop Las Vegas we're adding new Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) possibilities, all to help you as an IT leader become more agile.  As you move away from legacy systems, you need a strategy and a roadmap to transform your data center.  You need to migrate toward a more resilient infrastructure centered on the network, and evolve it along with the needs of your applications.

Cost pressures, technology changes, and game-changers like cloud computing are forcing IT departments to learn how to deliver IT services differently.  With Cisco ACI, we can help you increase the visibility, programmability, and automation of your physical and virtual networks from a centralized point of management, while helping to improve your financial and productivity metrics.

And, Cisco's unique unified architecture for the data center redefines the economics of your IT operations, so you can spend more of your resources to deliver value to your business.  With Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS), we can dramatically simplify your IT operations to help increase business agility, and reduce CapEx and OpEx.

Throughout your data center transformation, Cisco Services and our partners deliver a lifecycle approach with a broad range of capabilities for success during every phase.  Utilizing the Cisco Domain Ten? Framework, we can help develop an architectural strategy and transformational road map aligned with your business requirements.  When it comes time to deploy, we can help validate that the solutions you've selected are ready for production, and then work with your team to implement new or migrate existing applications.  Once in production, we can continue to help optimize your infrastructure, applications, and service-management approach to monitor and manage it all.

Organizations like yours across the globe are looking to Cisco to help unleash IT through a cloud-enabled infrastructure for increased agility.  You can then more readily leverage mobility for customer and employee engagement, use social media and mobile apps to transform the customer experience, and unlock intelligence from your massive stores of data, all while securing valuable assets and protecting your reputation.  Wherever you are on the path, Cisco Services is ready to engage with you on your journey of transformation to a more agile data center.