Accenture Japan Ltd. and Cisco Systems G.K. announced today that
they have extended the scope of their strategic alliance by expanding
an innovative virtual group to include a team focused on the Japanese
market. The Accenture & Cisco Business Group will provide customers
with design, configuration and operation services that integrate unified communications and collaboration tools into multiple applications across companies’ information technology infrastructures.
The Accenture & Cisco Business Group, announced in February, is
a cross-company initiative for the purpose of supporting sales,
marketing, customer engagement, and solution development by Accenture
and Cisco. The initiative combines Accenture’s deep expertise regarding
industry issues and business processes with Cisco’s expertise in
advanced and emerging technologies for collaboration and data center
virtualization. The virtual group will target customers in all sectors,
ranging from communications, manufacturing, health care, financial
services, and resources and energy to government and social
infrastructure.
Accenture and Cisco expanded the virtual group to help Japanese
companies take advantage of IT as a strategic asset to help them
further improve business agility, reduce costs, increase revenue and
deliver superior customer service. The Accenture & Cisco Business
Group will provide customers with more effective solutions and services
through close collaboration between Accenture and Cisco professionals
from around the world. The solutions focus on data center,
infrastructure and network, unified communications, and collaboration
and customer contact transformation.
Says Chikatomo Hodo, the president of Accenture: "Given the recent
economic situation, businesses face various issues they have not
experienced before, including the need to optimize their IT costs,
business efficiency and organization. The Accenture & Cisco
Business Group now enables us to offer all-round services to customers
through a single point of contact, based on Accenture’s expertise and
proven record in management and technology consulting, systems
integration, and outsourcing, and Cisco’s industry-leading IT assets
and technologies. This makes it possible for us to provide services
with even higher added value, in line with customers’ issues and needs."
"The launch of the Accenture & Cisco Business Group is another
critical milestone in our strategy to deliver world-class, unique and
differentiating business and technology solutions that support our
customers in Japan to successfully deliver on their strategy by
creating sustainable competitive advantage, significantly improving
their productivity and reducing cost. The Accenture & Cisco
Business Group brings complete and integrated value-propositions for
Unified Communications & Collaboration, Customer Contact
Management, Infrastructure and Datacenter Transformation tailored to
customers in all industries in Japan by effectively combining the
strengths of both Cisco and Accenture into ‘turnkey’ solutions," said
Edzard Overbeek, G.K. President for Cisco.
The following are the Accenture & Cisco Business Group’s first four comprehensive solutions:
- Data Center Solutions
The virtual group will provide consulting services for data center
optimization that support ERP platforms and cloud computing. The
solutions are based on the Cisco Unified Computing System, an
evolutionary data center architecture that unites computing, network,
storage access and virtualization
resources in a single energy-efficient system that supports backbone
applications, such as Oracle EBS and SAP, in large businesses.
Accenture and Cisco Unified Computing Solutions cover three main areas:
core enterprise applications; data center consolidation; and
infrastructure services or cloud computing. - Infrastructure and Network 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. - 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. - Customer Contact Transformation Solutions
help companies 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.
