So much of the hype around cloud has been around public cloud. A standard, best-effort cloud with minimum SLAs fill an important market need, and have been adopted widely. However successful, this is only part of the picture. Customers also want options for private cloud solutions: dedicated, customized, highly reliable, high performance, secure clouds, with on- and off-premise options.

According to an independent study from IDC, 39% of annual IT budgets will be for implementations of private cloud solutions by 2017 (versus public cloud services at 18%). Spending on private cloud services overall are expected to grow at 35% per year – that’s twice as high as public cloud at 19%!

We’re seeing key players shift towards private cloud as a foundation of their IT strategy. However, they offer limited options for private cloud, usually offering only a single cloud provider. Cisco’s differentiation includes choice of service provider, along with choice of management platform and of storage partner. Cisco Powered offers customers “a world of many clouds” based on choice and integration, the kind of flexibility that is fundamental to a network-based approach.