Accenture and Cisco have had business ties that date back to the origin of Ethernet. But as the world of networking changes, so must the relationship.
In February, the duo announced an expanded alliance resulting in "an innovative virtual group" called The Accenture & Cisco Business Group. This cross-company initiative is designed to help large enterprises embed collaborative tools and data center-based virtualization technologies within key business processes. The first deliverables will focus on customer contact transformation, infrastructure transformation, and unified communications and collaboration.
This is a dedicated business group in which Accenture and Cisco representatives will blend expertise and jointly support sales, marketing, and solution development. But this is not a joint venture, as in a separate entity. The staffs remains part of their respective organizations, yet, "it is a single team with a single set of business objectives," said Hans Hwang, Cisco's vice president of advanced services. "The unique aspect is that the organization is set up as one team to speed up the value we can deliver to customers. We don't have to coordinate how we will deliver specific engagements to customers because it is all pre-templated in advance, and pre-invested to specific solutions that are created."
The merger of Cisco technology and Accenture methodologies will move manufacturers into the realm of unified communications, remote diagnostics, and cloud computing, the partners said. For example, using Cisco's WebEx Web conferencing, Cisco TelePresence network-based meeting software, and Cisco Virtual Expert technology that includes remote IP video, an oil and gas company could analyze data at remote oil wells without having anyone physically present. Unified communications can be applied to product lifecycle management (PLM), as another example, by allowing R&D and engineering teams around the world to collaborate as if they were in the same location.