Networking gear provider Cisco released its first Global Cloud Index study, a new series that focuses on future global datacenter and cloud traffic. According to the inaugural issue, cloud traffic will multiple by 12 within the next 3 or so years at 66 percent, a compounded increase per year to 1.6 zettabytes, compared to today’s 130 annual exabytes.  Cisco says that’s the equivalent of 5 trillion hours of business teleconferencing over the web.

Overall datacenter traffic will fourfold to 4.8 zettabytes a year, and cloud activity will account for a rising portion of that.

Cloud is estimated today to be 11% of data center traffic, growing to more than 33% of the total by 2015, Cisco says. Greater virtualization and improved economies of scale will be key drivers of the cloud transition; cloud data centers offer better performance, higher utilization and greater ease of management than traditional data centers.

The company is making efforts to capitalize on this growth, similarly to many other firms in the IT industry that are profiting from companies’ gradual adoption of cloud and virtualization services. R&D represents a portion of these efforts, while investments account for another.

Cisco participated in the recent $8.5 million Series C funding round for Puppet Labs, a startup that offers open datacenter and automation software. Google Ventures and VMware, in addition to Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, True Ventures, and Radar Partners, also participated in the financing round.

And the industry is grabbing opportunity from every direction.  ScaleXtreme, which also makes management software for datacenters, had a notable launch not too long ago. The company rolled out the Dynamic Server Assembly feature to its  ScaleXtreme Xpress and ScaleXtreme Xpert offerings (with the former being the free edition based on the latter,) enabling users to provision  their cloud deployments across a number of 3^rd party vendors.