In what may offer a well-deserved boost to Cisco’s burgeoning cloud strategy, the networking giant has partnered with Microsoft to offer the Azure Stack on its Unified Computing System. Looking to make its mark in the hybrid cloud space, Cisco’s integrated, validated UCS will enable customers to deliver Microsoft Azure services from their on-premises data centre.

Giving customers the freedom to choose the best environments and  consumption models for both traditional and native applications, the tie-up between the tech giants offers customers full control over how they manage governance, security, and performance.

The tool has been designed to give companies the ability to grow and modernise in a flexible and scalable hybrid environment.

“Cisco and Microsoft are coming together to offer a hybrid cloud solution built on the power of UCS and Microsoft Azure,” said Liz Centoni, senior vice president and general manager, Computing Systems Product Group, Cisco. “Through our joint engineering efforts, application developers and IT managers will have a turnkey solution that is easy to deploy, manage and scale.”

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Cisco and Microsoft have worked together to develop simplified management and control, with the Cisco Integrated System for Azure Stack providing a single pane of glass for managing all elements of compute and networking through policy-based templates, reducing the total cost of ownership for joint customers. Be it Azure infrastructure as-a-service (Iaas) and platform-as-a-service (Paas), the two companies are selling their known brand with the system – hoping that the names Cisco and Microsoft instil greater confidence and trust in the IT environment.

“Microsoft and Cisco are proven innovators and trusted technology partners, giving customers the confidence their IT environments can be supported and secure. Microsoft Azure Stack provides services and application programming interfaces (APIs) compatible with the Azure public cloud, allowing developers to do their best work while giving them the agility to deploy their applications to public, private or hosted clouds,” said Mike Neil, corporate vice president, Azure Infrastructure & Management, Microsoft Corporation.

Cisco Integrated System for Azure Stack is targeted for availability in Q3-Q4 2017.