Brazil is a fast-growing IT market. Companies including Broadcom have expressed interest to strengthen their local presence, and now  Cisco is too.

IT training and certification is a big emphasis for the networking gear maker, specifically  cloud education: as a part of a new alliance with storage giant EMC and its subsidiary VMware,  new training courses will become available to partners of all three companies. Storage and virtualization are two of the topics which will be covered in the intiative, along with a couple of others including the somewhat less expected category of data science.

In addition, the  company announced plans to invest  $1 billion reais, or about $546 million, in manufacturing and emerging startups. This initiative will be spread over the course of the next four years.

“With today’s announcements, we reinforce Cisco’s long- term commitment to Brazil and expect to become a relevant partner in this incredible growth journey the country has been experiencing,” Rodrigo Abreu, president of Cisco’s Brazil division, said in the statement.”

Cisco’s investment is expected to generate 800 new jobs in a number of different industries. It will be involved in the development of technology for the upcoming 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics to be held in the Brazilian capital of Rio, and education is also an area of focus.

Cisco has already setup a training facility in the city, a part of the Cisco Networking Academy that teaches and certifies individuals for various positions associated with this field. It’s known as the Knowledge Square, and this project will apparently be expanded even further as the new capital flows in.

The company is growing across a number of different verticals, and that encompasses its non-organic expansion as well. One of the latest news from here is the acquisition of  ClearAccess for an undisclosed sum, a company that apparently makes inventory and back office management software. Cisco says that the merger will benefit it via the integration of the ClearAccess development team, which will now be assigned to projects that directly tie in with networking.