Frost & Sullivan Honors Cisco for Delivering Seamlessly Connected Enterprise Collaboration Solutions that Aid Efficiency and Optimization across Industrial Verticals

Cisco is the only solution provider to offer an exhaustive range of services for both shop-floor and enterprise networking, along with connectivity and collaboration between the two

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Frost & Sullivan

Sep 04, 2013, 08:02 ET

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Sept. 4, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Cisco has been selected as the recipient of the 2013 Global Frost & Sullivan Award for Customer Value Enhancement. The award is based on Frost & Sullivan's Vision of the Future of Manufacturing and Production 2.0 (Visi-MAP 2.0) research which identified the Top 50 Game Changers in manufacturing hardware and software. The Visi-MAP 2.0 initiative focuses on the vital convergence of critical Mega Forces that allow manufacturers to innovate, design, and drive next-generation manufacturing best practices, and uses this platform to identify companies that refuse to take a ringside spectator view of industry developments and instead, lead in the visionary innovation process.

Cisco stands out in the smart business collaboration solutions space for the manufacturing industry with its integrated, vertically relevant solutions for business and operations networks. It leverages an excellent partner ecosystem, including partnerships with key automation and intelligence solution providers, to offer higher value.

Cisco ensures that it stays ahead of the curve by predicting users' needs and securing their investments by constructing deeply ingrained security into its infrastructures. It achieves this through encryption, access control lists, virtual local area networks (LANs), role-based security, secure socket layer (SSL), and virtual private networks (VPNs).

Cisco offers a well-rounded enterprise collaboration product range, including WebEx (online meetings), Jabber (messaging, voice, video, voice messaging, desktop sharing, and conferencing from anywhere on any device), and the Unified Contact Center. While WebEx and Jabber are industry solutions of choice for anytime collaboration, the Unified Contact Center allows customers to deploy collaboration solutions to customer care service lines and offers a host of associated features, including collecting information from customer communications.

The company also provides a TelePresence suite that enables high-quality, high-definition, realistic, and lifelike video in any organization. These solutions are built to be the best collaboration tools, making talent available on demand, irrespective of location, and ultimately saving phone and travel costs.

"Cisco supports multiple deployment models, including the cloud, on-premise, and various hybrids in between; the company works across enterprise protocols, including public switched telephone network (PSTN)," said Frost & Sullivan Sr. Industry Analyst Muthuraman Ramasamy. "Cisco also leads the way in developing platform-agnostic solutions to comprehensively support the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend."

By having each asset and piece of equipment in a plant internally connected and capable of sending information to a main enterprise system, Cisco can provide customers single-plant views that have red-green key performance indices (KPIs), detailing processes at each sublevel. Cohesively integrating various facets of an organization and making data available to the right actors allows Cisco to not only enhance optimization and efficiency, but also de-silo the organization's hierarchy.

Meanwhile, Cisco has also combined Rockwell Automation's leading automation offering with its networking infrastructure to foster a deep integration that offers exponentially higher benefits to customers. This strategic collaboration enables Cisco to deliver services, including network assessment, management, auditing, and architecture services. Apart from this partnership, Cisco's collaboration with intelligence and analytics partner MicroStrategy, a leader in its domain, enables customers to derive intelligent, informed and integrated business insights from the multitude of data generated and transferred.

"The convergence of these best-in-class technologies through partnerships is generating never-before-seen value for manufacturing customers through seamlessly connected and converged environments, driving higher returns and profits," noted Ramasamy. "As an integrated solution provider, Cisco leads the market in terms of the value customers derive from its deployments, and this is evident from the return on investment tools provided to customers before and during deployments."

Each year, Frost & Sullivan presents this award to the company that has demonstrated excellence in implementing strategies that proactively create value for its customers with a focus on improving the return on the investment that customers make in its services or products. The award recognizes the company's inordinate focus on enhancing the value that its customers receive, beyond simply good customer service. This leads to improved customer retention and, ultimately, to client base expansion.

Frost & Sullivan Best Practices awards recognize companies in a variety of regional and global markets for demonstrating outstanding achievement and superior performance in areas such as leadership, technological innovation, customer service and strategic product development. Industry analysts compare market participants and measure performance through in-depth interviews, analysis and extensive secondary research to identify best practices in the industry.

About Cisco Systems, Inc.

Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) is the worldwide leader in IT that helps companies seize the opportunities of tomorrow by proving that amazing things can happen when you connect the previously unconnected. For ongoing news, please go to http://thenetwork.cisco.com.

Cisco offers products, solutions and services that help manufacturers and industrial companies reduce costs, speed response time, improve visibility and maximize operational efficiency. For more information, please visit www.cisco.com/go/manufacturing.

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SOURCE Frost & Sullivan