Just like we did last year, we're closing out 2012 with another set of awards from our colleagues in the Asia Pacific, Japan, and Greater China (APJC) market. These include:

Telecom Asia Readers' Choice Awards 2012 (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, November 29^th2012) for:

• Best Metro Network Vendor of the Year
• Carrier Ethernet Vendor of the Year

And then we followed that up a week later with wins at the Carrier Ethernet APAC Award 2012 (Hong Kong, Dec 4, 2012) for:

• Best Carrier Ethernet Aggregation Product: Cisco ASR 903 Series Aggregation Service Routers
• Best Carrier Ethernet Core Product: Cisco ASR 9922

Why, you may ask? We believe it's because we've long been an innovator in the Carrier Ethernet market and uniquely offer an end-to-end architectural approach for our solutions. These solutions represent pre-tested, validated systems that are ready to deploy. This reduces customer risk and time to market since the scale and performance parameters of the system -including network management -are known in advance, and not merely a box level (as with our competitors).

For example, the widely deployed Cisco Unified RAN Backhaul solution provides a complete portfolio for Carrier Ethernet backhaul -including not just the hardware platforms but also the end-to-end network management needed to maintain and provision services. Furthermore, no other vendor can match Cisco's product portfolio for access, aggregation, edge and core.

Cisco is also renowned for customer service, product quality and providing value to customers. Our complete RAN backhaul portfolio, together with Cisco Prime and network Virtualization (nV) technology, demonstrates the company's commitment to reduce the complexity of today's mobile network and to the lower the Total Cost of Ownership of networks for service providers.

None of this would be possible of course without the hard work of our engineers who are still creating new innovations -just be patient for what we'll announce next year!

We thank our customers for continuing to place their trust in us and we wish all of you the best in 2013!