Cisco and
IBM have announced
an expanded joint global support alliance covering 48 countries, to
provide product maintenance services for mutual enterprise
customers.
The expanded alliance comes soon after the pair announced that
they would jointly develop unified communications platforms to
customers.
The extended service collaboration builds on the joint support
success that IBM and Cisco say they have seen in the US, and means
that IBM customers who purchase Cisco networking technology
solutions will now get a globally consistent level of IT
infrastructure support, said the pair.
"This is a significant evolution in our Global Services
Alliance," said Karl Meulema, Cisco vice president for services
marketing and channels.
"Providing a collaborative maintenance service offering means
our mutual customers will no longer need to choose between Cisco
networking skills or IBM multi-vendor systems integrator
capabilities. Instead customers get the collective expertise of
both companies, combining the best of both worlds," he said.
Robert Kritzer, vice-president for the IBM-Cisco Strategic
Alliance at IBM Global Technology Services, said, "We have been
working together on these service offerings in the US for the past
three years. Our relationship with Cisco allows us to provide our
customers with a single resource to seamlessly and rapidly
integrate business processes, industry knowledge, information
technologies and the intelligence of the network."
IBM will market and sell this services offering under the ‘IBM
managed maintenance solution for Cisco products’ brand, while
collaboratively delivering the service with Cisco.
IBM will provide the customer with consolidated call management
for all networking devices and will retain responsibility for
resolving customer issues.
Technical support will be provided via IBM Technical Support
Centres by experienced network specialists, trained by Cisco, who
have access to IBM's technical support resource base.
Cisco will provide, through IBM, such benefits as worldwide 24x7
service escalation to the Cisco Technical Assistance Center,
special customer access to cisco.com, ongoing operating system
updates, advance hardware replacement, and tools and best practices
to address network issues.
Click for specific details regarding the ‘IBM managed maintenance
solution for Cisco products’ offering >>
Related article:
IBM and Cisco team up to develop unified comms platform
Comment on this article:
computer.weekly@rbi.co.uk