Cloud-Based Services Provider SolveDirect Purchased by Cisco
Cloud-Based Services Provider SolveDirect Purchased by Cisco by UCStrategies Staff
Cisco announced recently that it will purchase the Vienna, Austria-based SolveDirect, a company interested in cloud-delivered services management software and services. Cisco’s head of corporate business development, Hilton Romanowski, released the news via the company blog.
Romanowski wrote: “The move towards multi-sourcing and cloud services is accelerating the development of large ecosystems of companies – from enterprise IT and manufacturing, to SaaS providers – that need to share data in a secure and scalable way.”
He added: “Most of the interactions between these service partners today require manual effort, growing cost and complexity for an organization as their number of service partners grows. SolveDirect’s cloud-based solutions offer enterprises and service providers a flexible way to integrate with service partners, and automate sharing of processes, data, and workflows in real-time by eliminating manual practices and bottlenecks, driving significant operational efficiencies.”
Commenting further on the partnership, Romanowski spoke of SolveDirect’s capabilities, which will allow Cisco to broaden its smart and connected IT services portfolio to link with its customers, partners and resellers in the global ecosystem.
The ServiceGrid platform will act as a "single point of collaboration," merging the organisation of business, and offering service-level monitoring over various partners, regardless of their existing systems.
Cisco’s senior director and general manager of integration brokerage technology group, Mike Flannagan, said: “If you look at the average enterprise today, they have between 12 and 15 external IT service partners that they work with. The vast majority of interactions with those external parties are manual. They're either making phone calls back and forth, or sending emails, or using each other's web presence to provide updates on support issues. An automated electronic exchange of information is a lot more efficient. And that is effectively what SolveDirect does. It's a huge driver of operational efficiency that runs completely independent of any Cisco hardware or software solution.”
Flannagan also noted that SolveDirect’s engineering capabilities was another driver encouraging the acquisition of the company. The acquisition is expected to be finished in 2013’s Q4. (CY) Link. Link