Responding to strong customer and market demand to recognize the architectural expertise of network designers, Cisco introduced the Cisco Certified Architect, the highest level of accreditation achievable within Cisco Career Certifications.

Advanced technologies such as Cisco Unified Communications, Cisco TelePresence and mobility are converging and increasing the opportunities for innovation and collaboration while adding to the complexity of enterprise networks.

According to IDC, With many existing certifications focused on point technologies, architect-level certifications bring together project management, business needs analysis, and IT elements into a true solutions framework and validate a candidates ability to address planning, design, interoperability, and connectivity issues.

Gartner reported in its 2008 IT market compensation study (U.S. based), that IT organizations continue to have difficulty in finding skilled IT professionals, especially enterprise architects, network architects, project managers and Web application programmers.

The Cisco Certified Architect certification recognizes the architectural experience and competency of network designers who can support the increasingly complex networks of global organizations and effectively translate business strategies into evolutionary technical strategies.

Cisco channel partners play a critical role in enabling customers to deploy advanced new technologies supported by professionals with the skills required to use these innovative solutions.

The certification stands above the expert-level CCIE certification in terms of difficulty, with an emphasis on expertise in network infrastructure architecture and a proven ability to work with executive-level customers to ensure that business requirements are incorporated into successful designs.

It's exciting to see Cisco raising the bar at the high end of its certification program for IT professionals, said Zeus Kerravala, senior vice president, Yankee Group. Organizations will be encouraged to view architecture as a defined job role rather than as a component of a job role. For individuals, this new certification provides a level of expertise that will be attractive to CCDE and CCIE holders as a way to advance their careers.