There's no doubt Cisco's Unified Computing System has achieved significant momentum since its introduction just over three years ago.  One of the key contributing factors to our growth has been the strength of our open partner ecosystem strategy.  While many of our data center competitors have chosen to build rigid vertical stacks, Cisco has embraced a broad ecosystem of partners-and as a result provided unparalleled flexibility for customers to choose from best-of-breed storage, hypervisor and application vendors.

Today, we're further expanding our unified data center ecosystem by deepening our winning partnership with NetApp.   Cisco and NetApp have been partners for more than a decade and over the past two years our alliance has flourished with the introduction of the FlexPod converged infrastructure solution.  In fact, Cisco and NetApp now boast more than 2,100 FlexPod customers, with deployments in 35 countries and supported by more than 700 joint channel partners.

Building on that vote of confidence from our customers and partners, we are expanding our partnership to deliver deeper integrated solutions for a range of use cases ranging from data center to branch to service providers.  Specifically we'll collaborate in the following four areas:

• Deeper technology integration across the FlexPod architecture
• A new FlexPod solution for cloud-scale service providers
• Extending ExpressPod into the branch office
• Expanded FlexPod application validation

I invite you to learn more about today's announcement and share your thoughts on our expanded partnership with NetApp.