HCL, Cisco Ally For Vertical Specific Solutions

HCL Technologies (HCL), a leading global IT services provider, and Cisco Systems, Inc. a global leader in information technology products, have announced that they are jointly creating vertical solutions. First of these solutions is targeted at the financial services industry to improve the end-customer experience.

Since the inception of their strategic relationship in 1996, HCL and Cisco have been delivering joint solutions to their customers to keep up with the pace of technological developments. For instance, the cloud managed services platform of HCL, which is powered by Cisco UCS. However, with the change from “Technology-led” transformation to “Business-led” transformation in the customer’s industries, the two have re-defined their approach to joint solutions.

“The objective was to collaborate with innovative IT organisations such as Cisco and create a solution that enables the target Industries to achieve greater flexibility, multi-channel delivery, improved customer experience and delivers those through flexible business models. The solutions such as Customer Experience Management (CEM) address key concern of Financial Services players, in managing their existing customer experiences, providing more avenues for cross-sell /up-sell and also acquiring new customers while introducing new technology advances around mobility, cloud and collaboration in to the Business Departments of Financial Services organisations” stated Anubhav Saxena, Vice President, Global Business Marketing, Strategy and Strategic Alliances, HCL Technologies.

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“All our joint efforts are leading to solution offerings that converge business processes, applications, networks, mobile devices and beyond to increase effectiveness, responsiveness and mitigate risk for our customers from key industry verticals like Financial Services. The solutions also integrates components from Cisco’s Borderless Networks, Collaboration and Data Center/Virtualisation portfolios and leverages HCL’s exception capabilities around industry specific applications and system integration capabilities around Cisco architectures,” cited Stanimira Koleva, Managing Director, Partner Business Group, Asia Pacific, Japan & Greater China, Cisco Systems, Inc.

The CEM (Customer Experience Management) enables financial services firms to benefit from a cloud-based delivery capability in which communications, applications and people can be virtualised so the firms can improve customer experiences across diverse touch-points and delivery channels; locate and leverage subject-matter expertise across multiple delivery channels to improve sales and service thereby increasing revenue; promote offerings and engage customers/prospective customers using differentiating methods to increase wallet-share; reduce cost of deployment and operation through common, standard network architectures; remotely access systems and collaborate with partners and remote experts to reduce downtime; and improve operational efficiencies .A joint CEM lab is in the making with joint investments from both parties to demonstrate thesolution and will be launched by July 2012.

The HCL-Cisco relationship was formed in February 1996, with the setting up of Cisco’s first offshore development center—the Cisco Offshore Development Center—in Chennai, India. Since then the relationship has grown to a comprehensive 360 degree relationship covering sell-to, sell-with and sell-through addressing each others’ internal needs as well as customer needs in Hi-tech, Manufacturing, Financial Services, Healthcare, Retail and Media Entertainment across the globe.
Cisco and HCL have jointly worked together in creating private cloud solutions in the APAC –MEA region and the encouragement from those successes are leading to exploring new avenues of collaboration. While technology relevance exists at both infrastructure and application, creating business relevance while bringing together both the application and infrastructure as a triple play has been a challenge for many organisations- which is where this partnership focuses on.