Cisco enhanced its converged infrastructure lineup with a set of new and enhanced solutions for Microsoft’s Fast Track 3.0 data warehousing reference architecture. The company also announced a series of joint, go-to-market initiatives for channel partners that resell both its networking equipment and Microsoft cloud technologies.

Cisco integrated its Nexus 100V series switches with Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Extensible Switch and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 to enhance support for heterogeneous environments that include both physical networking and virtualized components. The company also upgraded its USC PowerTool interface via Microsoft’s Manager open API, and it rolled out new service pack for three apps in the UCS Management Pack: Operations Manager, Orchestrator, and Virtual Machine Manager.

These updates are joined by two new reference architectures for Fast Track: VSPEX Solution for Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track 3.0, and FlexPod with Microsoft Private Cloud.

“The intersection of computing, networking, virtualization, and software is at the center of a new era of innovation. Alliances like the one we have with Microsoft allow us the opportunity to jointly develop innovative and integrated solutions to help drive out data center complexity, in turn delivering simplified operations, and improved information technology productivity and data center utilization for our partners and customers,” said Satinder Sethi, the vice president of Cisco’s data center business.

Cisco’s product announcement comes on the heels of John McCool’s resignation from his role as the head of the company’s Enterprise Networking Sales Architecture team. McCool, who also served as the CTO of Cisco’s Global Enterprise Segment, has been replaced by Tom Wilburn.

McCool’s departure may have something to do with Cisco’s increased focused on SDN. The company is a backer of OpenDaylight, a recently launched initiative that aims to create a standardized platform for software-defined networking.