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Microsoft, Cisco Enter Three-Year Cloud Partnership

Microsoft and Cisco on Tuesday announced a three-year agreement in which the two will invest in combined sales, marketing and engineering resources.

As part of the partnership, announced at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference in Washington, D.C., Cisco unveiled integrated products and services that will focus on the Microsoft private cloud, migration of servers, services providers and SQL Server 2014.

"Cisco and Microsoft sales teams will work together on cloud and datacenter opportunities, including an initial program focused on the migration of Windows 2003 customers to Windows 2012 R2 on the Cisco UCS [Unified Computing Systems] platform," the networking giant said in its announcement.

The partnership is aimed at deepening the integration between the two companies' products, according to Denny Trevett, vice president of global ISV and technology partners at Cisco.

"This greater alignment between Cisco and Microsoft will set the stage for deeper technology integration," Trevett said in a blog post. "Together we will deliver an expanded portfolio of integrated solutions to help customers modernize their datacenters and accelerate their transition to the cloud."

A bevy of other offerings to be integrated includes Cisco Nexus switching, Cisco UCS Manager with System Center integration modules, Cisco PowerTool, Windows Server 2012 R2, System Center 2012 R2, Windows PowerShell and Microsoft Azure. Future releases will integrate Cisco ACI and Cisco InterCloud Fabric.

Further details were offered by Jim McHugh, vice president of product and solutions marketing at Cisco's UCS division. "At Cisco we believe our foundational technologies -- with UCS as the compute platform, Nexus as the switching platform, and with UCS Manager and System Center management integration -- provide customers an optimal infrastructure for their Microsoft Windows Server workloads of SQL, SharePoint, Exchange and Cloud," McHugh said in a blog post.

Microsoft and Cisco already have one joint cloud partnership under their belts. Eight months ago, the companies announced an application centric infrastructure (ACI) deal, which now-Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella had described as an effort to "bring together Microsoft's Cloud OS and Cisco's Application Centric Infrastructure...to deliver new integrated solutions that help customers take the next step on their cloud computing journey."

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About the Author

David Ramel is the editor of Visual Studio Magazine.