Accenture and Cisco have kicked off efforts to encourage more enterprise joint-engagements with a triplet of services to help businesses win and retain customers, eliminate communications bottlenecks, or better manage their infrastructure refresh programmes.
The companies will team up for projects, drawing staff and resources from both organisations into a virtual group so that assignments are handled by the best of the talent pool, who are able to draw on a combined portfolio that is both broad and deep.
The Accenture & Cisco Business Group will be headed by Andre Hughes, managing director for Accenture.
The two companies already work together, and he said the group was formed to help enable companies to take advantage of IT as a strategic asset. “We formed the Group to provide a seamless services team” he explained, noting that CIOs must nowadays gauge every turn against cost-reduction, top and bottom-line growth, immediate payback and long-term value.
In the area of unified communications, the new group would look for ways to exploit a portfolio that includes Cisco Unified Communications Manager, Cisco Unified Messaging, Cisco TelePresence, Cisco WebEx and Expert Locator lines, and Accenture’s Grapevine, WhiteSpace and SABLE (Search, Analyze and Browse Large Environments) tools.
The group’s Infrastructure Transformation offer is designed to help Global 2000 businesses optimise their networking and data centre plans.
A third strand, the cobranded Accenture Cisco Customer Contact Transformation Solution, will blend the use of CRM systems with Cisco technologies, so that service agents are given some new options in the way they use e-mail, instant messaging and video to interact with customers.
