En Pointe Technologies announced it has reached the Cisco Cloud Provider Certification in its efforts to service the ever-growing cloud network market. The Cisco certification carries a Powered Cloud Hosted Collaboration System (HCS) Service designation and with that, the company is now offering its En Pointe Collaboration Solution (ECS)-validated Cisco infrastructure and HCS applications.

ECS provides cloud-based collaboration features including telephony, mobility, fax-over-IP, call center, presence and instant messaging, and voice, and video- and web-conferencing. According to the press release, its benefits include:

“The Cisco Powered Cloud Service designation illustrates En Pointe’s vision of the cloud as a comprehensive service that mid-market and enterprise companies can use to their advantage,” said Dr. Shahzad Munawwar, COO of En Pointe, in the prepared statement. “This designation signifies our ability to combine Cisco solutions with our own services to create and deliver high-value cloud based offerings to our customers while meeting stringent requirements set by Cisco.”

Last month En Pointe and Symantec launched a joint effort to deliver MS Office 365, with the apparent additional goal of protecting client data.

Cisco, meanwhile, has joined 18 other technology companies pledging a total of $4 million annually to support the newly formed OpenStack Foundation. The foundation will foster the ongoing development of open source cloud platform OpenStack. With the Citrix decision last week to openly put CloudStack’s support behind Amazon Web Services, competition in the open source cloud world has intensified.