Another day, another landmark alliance. Except this time, the parties involved are not a pair of up-and-coming startups but Cisco and Microsoft, leaders in their respective markets that, despite their size, have not yet been able to catch up to Amazon in the public cloud.

The main focus of this partnership is driving sales growth. Under the agreement, the companies will restructure their respective channel programs to provide more incentives for joint partners and have their sales teams cooperate on areas of shared strategic interest such as the discontinuation of support for Windows Server 2003 next year. The ensuing mass migration of enterprises is expected to create a $10 billion opportunity that Microsoft and Cisco intend to capitalize upon with a joint program that will pave a migration path towards Windows 2012 R2 on Cisco’s Unified Computing Systems.

The alliance comes at an important time for both companies as they seek to build a cohesive cloud portfolio in an effort to keep up with the fast-growing enterprise demand for the technology. To that end, Microsoft has renewed its hybrid computing drive and, identifying the partner ecosystem an essential component of future success, recently brought NetApp, Inc. into the Azure fold. Cisco, meanwhile, had revealed plans to invest more than $1 billion over the next three years to set up a federated “intercloud” in which Azure, one of the top three public cloud platforms, would fit perfectly.

The newly established partnership between Cisco and Microsoft has been deliberately synchronized to that three-year roadmap. The companies will focus exclusively on customers in the United States, Canada, UK, Germany, France, and Australia for the first 12 months, and expand to other markets afterwards.

Cisco and Microsoft make for a formidable duo, but they’re far from the only cross-industry pair looking to capitalize on the rapid adoption of cloud services: The announcement of the alliance comes six months after Verizon and Oracle joined forces with the very same goal.

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