The market is moving fast and the pace of change is dramatic. The days of partners launching new services into the market every 6-12 months are gone. Customers are expecting new applications almost daily that will allow them to deliver innovation, increase top line revenue and accelerate productivity across their company.

As the supply of cloud services grows we see the need for our partners to tap into a diverse set of public clouds around the world to enable unmatched data sovereignty, and we see more opportunities for them to work together around common standards of workload interoperability, global portability and security. However until today, there has never been the right platform to allow partners to harness the world of many clouds on behalf of their customers. Cisco today announced plans to build a global intercloud -a network of clouds -together with a set of partners.  Called Cisco Cloud Services, this new intercloud opens up a myriad of new opportunities for partners.

Cisco is expanding the Cisco Powered program to include Cisco Cloud Services. Cisco will sell these new services through channel partners and directly to end customers. Partners who develop Cisco Powered services can extend their portfolio through new Cisco cloud offers for faster time to market and global scale.

Cisco Cloud Services will allow partners to expand the portfolio of cloud services they can offer into the market and deliver these within a standardized architecture backed by Cisco's brand and SLAs.  This global public cloud platform will allow our partners to enable applications, unique Cisco technologies such as WebEx, Cisco Cloud Web Security and Meraki, as well as third party applications. In doing so, they are now tapping into revenue streams and profit pools they historically could not participate in, improving profitability and relevance with the customer.

Cisco Cloud Services also provides an opportunity for traditional resellers, providers, and new entrants to participate as part of a shared risk model supported by Cisco and our partner community. With limited CapEx and OpEx required, a partner will be able to resell or co-brand IaaS+SaaS and transition their business towards an annuity-based model.

As customers move towards Hybrid IT, this new model also represents a tremendous services opportunity for our partners. As customers evolve their architectures, network assessments become imperative and a big opportunity for partners.

In addition, this becomes a cloud on-boarding opportunity. As customers transition to the new environment, they will need help in moving the workloads from their production servers to the new environment. This then becomes a cloud consumption opportunity for which an IT manager will need to create a framework to educate users on how to consume cloud in a hybrid environment. This represents yet another services opportunity for our partners.

With Cisco Cloud Services, Cisco's highly-valued go-to-market engine doesn't go away. Our ability to help partners monetize their investments made in Cisco is part of our channel philosophy.  Cisco's longstanding partner assets in the areas of time-to-market, market awareness, enablement and demand generation, along with alignment with a world-class field organization, will continue to thrive in this new approach in the market.

For more details on this exciting announcement, please read Cisco's cloud press release and Rob Lloyd's cloud blog.