"By allowing companies to focus on business innovation instead of technology integration, VCE represents the future of IT. Together with EMC, we intend to lead this industry for years to come," said John Chambers, Chairman and CEO of Cisco, as Cisco and EMC announced earlier this week that demand for their VCE™ joint venture's products and services has surpassed the $1 billion dollar annual run rate milestone.

That milestone makes VCE one of the fastest-growing companies in IT industry history.

It was also confirmed that VCE has shipped its 1,000th Vblock™ converged infrastructure system in slightly over three years since the company's inception.

"VCE is the outstanding result of the long-standing and successful partnership between EMC and Cisco. VCE continues to lead the converged infrastructure market and is one of the fastest growing companies in the history of IT," Chambers added.

Formed in November 2009 by Cisco and EMC, with investments from VMware and Intel, VCE pioneered a new segment of the market with the innovative VCE Vblock pre-integrated converged infrastructure - the industry's first completely integrated IT offering with end-to-end vendor accountability.

VCE claims to be "the only company to engineer, manufacture, deliver and fully support its converged infrastructure offering with end-to-end multi-vendor visibility, enabling the leading time-to-market and one of the lowest total cost-of-ownership (TCO) for converged cloud infrastructure."

The Vblock converged infrastructure is designed to standardize processes and product life cycle management to significantly improve application availability and help enable what the joint venture calls VCE's "seamless support experience."

Joe Tucci, Chairman and CEO of EMC, commented:

"Three years ago, Cisco and EMC announced that we would change the course of IT, and we did. VCE is ushering in a new era of IT transformation. Dynamic, agile IT drives dynamic, agile business and VCE has enabled companies of all sizes to realize game-changing benefits with converged infrastructure. This is just the beginning of what we will achieve in our joint venture with Cisco through our shared vision, continued investments, and the strength of and commitment to our partnership."