Accenture and Cisco announced that they have expanded their strategic alliance to form an innovative virtual group to help large enterprises around the world increase business agility by embedding collaboration and data center virtualization capabilities into their key business processes.

The Accenture & Cisco Business Group will design, build and run an expansive portfolio of business solutions that integrate unified communication and collaboration tools into multiple applications across companies’ IT infrastructures. The group also announced the launch of the first three solutions, which focus on customer contact transformation, infrastructure transformation, and unified communications and collaboration.

The Accenture & Cisco Business Group is a cross-company initiative for supporting sales, marketing, customer engagement and solution development. It gives customers access to Accenture’s industry-specific understanding of how technology affects people and business processes as well as Cisco’s expertise in advanced and emerging technologies, such as collaboration and data center virtualization technologies. The group will help large enterprises vastly improve the way globally dispersed professionals communicate and collaborate with fellow employees, customers, partners and suppliers in a wide range of industries, from telecommunications, healthcare and government to financial services, energy and utilities, regardless of whether the customer has contracts with Cisco or Accenture for the services.

Accenture and Cisco formed the group to help enable companies to 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 helps companies remove technology and process barriers by providing the strategy, architecture design and implementation services to integrate Accenture’s and Cisco’s collaboration services and technologies - such as unified communications, Cisco WebEx collaboration, and Cisco TelePresence - into the companies’ core business processes and technology platforms. For example, an oil and gas company, by integrating Cisco TelePresence and Cisco Virtual Expert technologies with its existing IT infrastructure, could enable its engineers to analyze data from oil wells in remote locations around the world without requiring employees to physically travel to those areas. In addition to reducing travel expense, this could also help reduce the time to make decisions on where to drill for oil, which could have a significant impact on the company’s strategic and operational efficiency.

The following are Accenture & Cisco Business Group’s first three comprehensive solutions.

Customer Contact Transformation Solutions help companies to 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.

Unified Communications and Collaboration Solutions include services that are tailored to companies’ 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.

Infrastructure Transformation 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.