In a few weeks thousands of IT leaders, telco operators, cloud administrators, app developers and OpenStack contributors will arrive in Austin, Texas for the OpenStack Summit. As you may know, Austin was the location of the very first OpenStack Summit six years ago and it will be exciting for everyone present to see just how far the developer and user community have come in that time.

The past two years have also been quite an exciting period for Cisco as well. During that time, we launched our Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) solution and have seen it adopted by over 1400 customers. ACI was designed to offer policy-based automation, multi-tenancy, and security across any physical or virtual environment and as part of that effort, our team has been working tirelessly to build the best possible OpenStack solution on the market today. We've leveraged the capabilities of the Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC), Nexus 9000, and OpFlex to deliver a fully distributed, hardware accelerated neutron networking solution, integrated overlay and underlay, advanced operations and visibility, and network service integration. We have also been contributing to upstream efforts such as Group-Based Policy to help OpenStack users adopt policy-based approaches regardless of their underlying infrastructure.

To learn more about what we've been up to and hear directly from the team at Sungard Availability Services about their experience deploying OpenStack, Cisco ACI, and Group-Based Policy, come see our session at the OpenStack summit.

Sungard and Cisco Deliver an Enterprise Cloud Featuring Policy-Based Automation - Monday 12:05-12:45, Austin Convention Center, Level 4, MR 19 A/B

If you are interested in getting hands on experience, I also recommend you check out Group-Based Policy hands on lab in Austin as well. GBP was created to offer intent-based policy and automation on any infrastructure environment and the special will offer a chance to both learn about and try out the upstream project.

Developing, Deploying, and Consuming L4-7 Network Services in an OpenStack Cloud-Thursday 4:10pm-5:40pm, JW Marriott Austin -110 East 2nd Street, Austin, TX 78701

Aside from these sessions we will of course be showcasing demos featuring Group-Based Policy, ACI, and OpenStack in our booth and will have subject matter experts on hand to answer specific questions. If you are interested in having a more focused engagement on these topics at the summit, please reach out to your Cisco account representatives.

Look forward to seeing everyone in Austin to tell you more about ACI and OpenStack and reflect on the progress we've made as an open source community. For more information, visit cisco.com/go/openstacksummit