Ciscos Technology Alliances By Herbert Beard Working with suppliers can become very interesting considering the innovative

capabilities of your supplier. While competition among competitors is increasing, the supply chains ability to innovate new ideas is becoming more important than ever. Supplier innovation can produce profitable growth via improved differentiation and speed, and lower costs. Suppliers and partners provide ideas, reduce

development costs and time, reduce COGS, and pave the way to a price premium (ATKearney). Is it possible for an alliance to be strategic to only one of the parties in a relationship? Many alliances default to some form of revenue generationwhich is certainly important but revenue alone may not be truly strategic to the objectives of the business. There are five general criteria that differentiate strategic alliances from conventional alliances. First, the criteria must be critical to the success of a core business goal or objective. Second, the alliance should be critical to the development or maintenance of a core competency or other source of competitive advantage. Third, the alliance should block a competitive threat. Fourth, the alliance should create or maintain a strategic choice for the firm. Finally, the alliance should mitigate a significant risk to the business. These general criterias were meaningful to Cisco while choosing partners (Wakeam). Cisco Systems Inc. is making great strides to become the leader in innovation world. Furthermore, Cisco is very involved in maintaining an innovative supply chain. In the process of becoming more involved in innovation Cisco has created a plethora of technical alliances or strategic partners to stay ahead of the innovation curve. Ciscos strategic partners includes: CA Technologies, CSC, Capgemini, EMC Emerson, Fujitsu, Hitachi, IBM, Intel, NSN, Nokia, TCS, and Wipro. However, I will only discuss a few partnerships (Partner). Cisco and CA Technologies has helped companies optimize their environment by lowering their Total Cost of Ownership, reduce risk, and improve manageability. The optimization of such

environments can help increase efficiency and services while keeping cost to a minimum. Together, CA Technologies and Cisco has helped IT transform from maintaining technology to delivering innovation to businesses. Also, with their teamwork CA Technologies is able to provide a comprehensive set of solutions designed to accelerate and optimize cloud services delivered across Cisco s architectures and platforms. These include the virtualized data center, next-generation network infrastructure and WAN optimization, and management of Cisco IP telephony systems and video traffic. The collaboration between the two companies has made it possible for customers to receive end-to-end, real time, application response reports. These will have a significant effect on customer service by reducing

response times by shorting pipeline which information travels. Also, Cisco has made other efforts to customer experiences with other partners (Partner). IBM and Cisco are two companies which are working together to form one team with infinite solutions by facilitating business agility for the challenges of tomorrow. They have been helping

organizations use groundbreaking technologies to find better ways to connect people and share critical data across their businesses (Partner). For example, an aircraft manufacturer knew it needed an upgrade when its poorly designed and aging wireless network equipment at its facilities failed to deliver sufficient coverage, performance and availability as it approached end of life. Furthermore, employees lost connectivity as they moved from room to room, and experienced problems when too many users attempted to access the network at the same time. The manufacturer also had concerns about the security of its network infrastructure, and the possibility of unauthorized personnel gaining access to confidential data. With the manufacturer in dire need to improve its capabilities it engaged with IBM and Cisco to evaluate its existing network for upgrades to the latest components to transform their security, coverage, and availability. As a result of the collaboration between Cisco and IBM employees are able to work in a timely fashion without having to worry about walking around the facility to find Wi-Fi. Also, the security upgrades has made it possible for only authorized individuals to gain access to the network (Partner/Aircraft). The final technical alliance to discuss will be the General Electric Co. Recently, General Electric Co. announced they will be working with AT&T Inc., Cisco Systems Inc., and Intel Corp to lengthen its Industrial Internet service, which would allow its customers to analyze data and predict outcomes. The ability to analyze and predict data can become a huge advantage over competitors because it will give managers valuable information on outcomes before actually applying the resources. Also, the idea will reduce R&D cost for better and newer innovation in the future. The collaboration among these

companies will also help connect machines to the network and the cloud. Workers will have the ability to track, monitor, and operate GE's machinery wirelessly from anywhere through secure machine-tomachine communications (GE). Machine-to-machine communication in the transport and logistics sector allows for real time tracking of pallets and packages to allow companies to gain real time updates on their whereabouts (Lohman). Ciscos commitment to innovation has proven to become very successful to its companys path to success and its alliances also. With more companies striving to become innovative and effective the importance of maintaining relationships with strategic partners will become vital in the future.

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