Cisco and IBM have announced the expansion of their Global Services Alliance and their collaboration to provide product maintenance services for mutual enterprise customers in 46 new countries.
"This is a significant evolution in our Global Services Alliance," said Karl Meulema vice president, Cisco 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 multivendor systems integrator capabilities. Instead customers get the collective expertise of both companies, combining the best of both worlds."
"We have been working together on these service offerings in the United States for the past three years and are excited to offer a broader global customer experience by expanding our efforts into additional markets around the world," said Robert Kritzer, vice president, IBM-Cisco Strategic Alliance, IBM Global Technology Services. "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."
"The 'IBM managed maintenance solution for Cisco products' provides us with a single escalation point for maintenance services across multiple vendor products that comprise our global reservation system," said Charlie Majane, director of technical services at Carey International, a leading global provider of limousine services and luxury ground transportation. "Our clients count on Carey's reservations specialists and customer care representatives 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. IBM and Cisco's collaborative service relationship has simplified our billing and service delivery processes spanning 65 countries."
IBM will market and sell this services offering under the name "IBM managed maintenance solution for Cisco products," 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 Centers by highly experienced network specialists, trained by Cisco, who have access to IBM's technical support resource base.
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