Networking solutions giant Cisco today said it has signed a multi-year agreement with software major Microsoft to modernise data centres.

The partnership was announced at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Washington today.

"Today at the Microsoft WPC, Cisco announced a multi-year sales and go-to-market agreement with Microsoft designed to modernise data centres through the delivery and acceleration of integrated solutions," Cisco said in a statement.

Under the agreement, both the firm will invest in joint sales, engineering and marketing resources to accelerate integrated solutions for enterprise and service provider data centres, it added.

"Cisco and Microsoft agree to a three-year go-to-market plan focused on transforming data centres through the delivery of integrated solutions for enterprise customers and service providers," Cisco said.

In the first year, the firms will focus on six countries -- the US, Canada, UK, Germany, France, and Australia -- with expansion to additional countries in the following years, it added.

Cisco and Microsoft will align partner incentive programmes to accelerate solutions selling via mutual channel partners.

The sales teams of both the companies will work together on cloud and data centre opportunities, including an initial programme focused on the migration of Windows 2003 customers to Windows 2012 R2 on the Cisco UCS platform.