VEVEY, Switzerland, February 16, 2004 - Cisco Systems today announced that Nestlé, the world's largest food company, has selected Cisco as one of two major global suppliers of Internet Protocol (IP) telephony equipment for its worldwide company operations. The move will ultimately give Nestlé a standard platform for voice communications and applications across the globe.
Nestlé does business in more than 120 countries - with industrial production in 86 of them, providing beverages, mineral waters, prepared foods, ice cream, chocolate, pet care, nutrition and pharmaceutical products, and offers some of the world's best known brands and products including Perrier, Nescafi, Stouffer's and Kit Kat.
For many Nestlé companies, telephony PBX equipment has historically been the responsibility of the building manager and was considered part of the building infrastructure. As the result of a voice project launched in October 2002, Nestlé recognized the fact that voice and data networks are converging. Nestlé acknowledges that voice is becoming another application running on its IT infrastructure, understands the long lifecycle of voice equipment, and sees Cisco as a long-term partner. Nestlé expects the full convergence of its voice and data networks to take 5 to 10 years but its decision to standardize today is seen as a critical step towards that outcome. Nestlé will standardize the procurement process and provide guidelines and recommendations to individual Nestlé markets about how to improve the interoperability and efficiency of their voice and data networks. This coordination effort led to the appointment of Cisco as one of the major providers of comprehensive, end-to-end IP communications platforms.
The benefits of introducing Cisco's IP telephony infrastructure include a rapid deployment and more coherent support for a consistent set of desktop services and new applications - which fulfill many of the requirements for enabling increasingly flexible working patterns.
"One of the benefits and key differentiator of the Cisco IP telephony system is that it goes far beyond a resilient platform for voice communications. It also allows easy and rapid video and unified messaging integration," said Yvon Le Roux, vice president, Cisco Systems EMEA . "For example, the tight integration with Cisco infrastructure could also enable Nestlé to easily add wireless IP handsets for their manufacturing facilities or to add applications to its 7900 series IP phones, to greatly increase productivity and customer and employee satisfaction."
