JOHANNESBURG, South Africa, 14 September 2010 – Accenture South Africa Pty Ltd and Cisco today announced they have extended the scope of their strategic relationship to serve clients in the South African market. The Accenture & Cisco Business Group will help clients embed collaboration and data centre virtualization capabilities into key business processes, helping to reduce cost, increase revenue and enhance customer service.
The Accenture & Cisco Business Group combines Accenture’s industry and business-process expertise with Cisco’s experience in advanced and emerging technologies.
Highlights / Key Facts:
The Accenture & Cisco Business Group is a cross-company initiative for the purpose of supporting sales, marketing, customer engagement, and solution development by Accenture and Cisco. The group will target clients in all sectors, ranging from communications, manufacturing, health care, financial services, resources and energy to government and social infrastructure.
Accenture and Cisco have expanded their global relationship to help South African organisations take advantage of information technology (IT ) as a strategic asset to improve business agility, reduce costs, increase revenue and deliver superior customer service.
The Accenture & Cisco Business Group will provide clients with more effective solutions and services through a close collaboration between Accenture and Cisco professionals from around the world. The solutions focus on data centre and network transformation.
The following are the Accenture & Cisco Business Group’s first two comprehensive solutions:
Data Centre Solutions: The group will provide consulting services for data centre optimisation that support enterprise resource planning platforms and cloud computing. The solutions are based on the Cisco Unified Computing SystemTM, an evolutionary data centre architecture that unites computing, network, storage access and virtualisation 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 System Solutions cover three main areas: core enterprise applications; data centre consolidation; and infrastructure services or cloud computing.
Network Transformation Solutions: These solutions combine the capabilities of Accenture’s business-process experts and Cisco networking experts to help companies optimise their network and data centre infrastructures to improve the performance of mission-critical applications and reduce risks. The solutions include designing, building and running robust and adaptive infrastructures that enable clients to offer differentiated customer experiences. Combined with Cisco’s advanced communications technologies the solutions help clients increase revenue, reduce costs and improve agent productivity while evolving to a more virtualised enterprise.
Executive Quotes:
William Mzimba, chief executive of Accenture South Africa:
“In current economic times businesses in South Africa are increasingly facing pressing challenges as well as many opportunities; subsequently the need to optimise IT costs, business and organisational efficiency is at the top of the agenda. The Accenture & Cisco strategic relationship will enable us to offer all-round services to our clients through a single point of contact, leverage both companies’ cross-industry expertise, and strengthen our capability to enhance client value and experience.”
David Meads, general manager for Cisco, South Africa:
“The Accenture & Cisco Business Group brings complete and integrated value-based IT solutions for our customers in South Africa and will enable them to successfully deliver on their strategy by creating a sustainable competitive advantage, significantly improving their productivity and reducing cost. Our strategic relationship with Accenture will help public, private sector and government organizations across South Africa to move seamlessly to a more virtualised environment, using the network as the platform to enable access to key business processes and applications anytime, anywhere, from any device.”
Links / URLs:
For more information on these solutions go to http://www.acbg.com
RSS feed for Cisco: http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/rss.html
News@Cisco in Africa: http://newsroom.cisco.com/africa
About Accenture
Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, with more than 190,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. 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. The company generated net revenues of US$21.58 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2009. Its home page is www.accenture.com.
About Cisco
Cisco, (NASDAQ: CSCO), the worldwide leader in networking that transforms how people connect, communicate and collaborate, this year celebrates 25 years of technology innovation, operational excellence and corporate social responsibility. Information about Cisco can be found at http://www.cisco.com. For ongoing news, please go to http://newsroom.cisco.com. Cisco equipment in emerging markets is supplied by Cisco Systems International BV, a wholly owned subsidiary of Cisco Systems, Inc.
