NEW YORK, NY and SAN JOSE, CA--(Marketwire - February 24, 2009) - Accenture (
NYSE:
ACN) and
Cisco (
NASDAQ:
CSCO) announced today that they have expanded their
strategic alliance to form an innovative virtual group to
help large enterprises around the world increase business agility by
embedding
collaboration
and
data center virtualization capabilities into their key business
processes. The
Accenture & Cisco
Business Group will design, build and run an expansive portfolio of
business solutions that integrate unified communication and collaboration
tools into multiple applications across companies' IT infrastructures. The
group also announced the launch of the first three solutions, which focus
on customer contact transformation, infrastructure transformation, and
unified communications and collaboration.
The Accenture & Cisco Business Group is a cross-company initiative for
supporting sales, marketing, customer engagement and solution development.
It gives customers access to Accenture's industry-specific understanding of
how technology affects people and business processes as well as Cisco's
expertise in advanced and emerging technologies, such as collaboration and
data center virtualization technologies. The group will help large
enterprises vastly improve the way globally dispersed professionals
communicate and collaborate with fellow employees, customers, partners and
suppliers in a wide range of industries, from telecommunications,
healthcare and government to financial services, energy and utilities,
regardless of whether the customer has contracts with Cisco or Accenture
for the services.
Accenture and Cisco formed the group to help enable companies to take
advantage of IT as a strategic asset to help them further improve business
agility, reduce costs, increase revenue and deliver superior customer
service.
"Now more than ever, our clients face a range of challenges, from reducing
operational costs and managing complex consolidations to competing globally
and facing competitors with new cost-efficient business models," said Andre
Hughes, managing director for Accenture, who leads the virtual group. "We
formed the Accenture & Cisco Business Group to provide a seamless services
team that can help clients improve their performance and competitiveness by
making it easier for them to harness technology as they adapt to new ways
of working."
"For collaboration tools to deliver maximum value, they must extend
seamlessly beyond desktop, organizational, and corporate boundaries,
becoming intrinsically available to processes and applications across the
IT infrastructure," said Rob Lloyd, senior vice president, U.S., Canada and
Japan for Cisco. "Together with Accenture, we're helping companies move to
a more virtualized environment, using the network as the platform to enable
seamless access to key business processes and applications anytime,
anywhere, from any device."
The Accenture & Cisco Business Group helps companies remove technology and
process barriers by providing the strategy, architecture design and
implementation services to integrate Accenture's and Cisco's collaboration
services and technologies -- such as unified communications, Cisco®
WebEx™ collaboration, and Cisco TelePresence™ -- into the companies'
core business processes and technology platforms. For example, an oil and
gas company, by integrating Cisco TelePresence and Cisco Virtual Expert
technologies with its existing IT infrastructure, could quickly enable its
engineers to analyze data from oil wells in remote locations around the
world without requiring employees to physically travel to those areas. In
addition to reducing travel expense, this could also help reduce the time
to make decisions on where to drill for oil, which could have a significant
impact on the company's strategic and operational efficiency.
The following are Accenture & Cisco Business Group's first three
comprehensive solutions:
- Customer Contact
Transformation Solutions help companies to win and retain customers
with a superior customer service experience that differentiates the
organization. The solutions unite expertise in customer relationship
management, analytics, workflow performance and hiring software
applications with intelligent
customer-contact collaboration solutions that can help improve agent
agility and optimize processes.
- Unified
Communications and Collaboration Solutions include services that
are tailored to companies' unique environments to enable new ways of doing
business and help create a sustainable competitive advantage. By combining
an understanding of the client's business processes, IT architecture and
how users actually adopt technology, these solutions help clients
collaborate to accelerate decision making and improve operational
performance.
- Infrastructure Transformation Solutions combine the capabilities of Accenture's
business-process experts and Cisco networking experts to help companies
optimize their network and data center infrastructures to improve the
performance of mission-critical applications and reduce risks. The
solutions offer a foundation to build
productivity-enhancing applications, such as highly secure virtual
conferencing and collaboration, as companies evolve to a more virtualized
enterprise.
For more information on these solutions please contact your Accenture or
Cisco representative or go to
www.acbg.com.
Links:
Accenture and Cisco Executive
Videos
Cisco
collaboration
Solutions
Cisco
data center virtualization Solutions
About Accenture
Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and
outsourcing company. Combining unparalleled experience, comprehensive
capabilities across all industries and business functions, and extensive
research on the world's most successful companies, Accenture collaborates
with clients to help them become high-performance businesses and
governments. With more than 186,000 people serving clients in over 120
countries, the company generated net revenues of US$23.39 billion for the
fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2008. Its home page is
www.accenture.com.
About Cisco
Cisco (
NASDAQ:
CSCO) is the worldwide leader in networking that transforms
how people connect, communicate and collaborate. Information about Cisco
can be found at
http://www.cisco.com. For ongoing news, please go to
http://newsroom.cisco.com.
Accenture, its logo, and High Performance Delivered are trademarks of
Accenture. Cisco, Cisco Systems, the Cisco logo, Cisco TelePresence and
Cisco WebEx are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco Systems, Inc.
For direct RSS Feeds of all Cisco news, please visit "News@Cisco" at the
following link:
http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/rss.html
Contact Information: Media Contact:
Ed Trapasso
Accenture
email: ed.trapasso@accenture.com
phone: +1-917-452-3555
Pamela Ferrill
Cisco
email: parupert@cisco.com
phone: +1-408-527-9076
Analyst Contacts:
Rob Petrucelli
Accenture
email: robert.d.petrucelli@accenture.com
phone: +1-917-452-4810
Laura Irwin
Cisco
email: lirwin@cisco.com
phone: +1-408-853-8876