TOKYO – Dec. 10, 2009 – Accenture Japan Ltd. and Cisco Systems G.K. announced today that they have extended the scope of their strategic alliance by expanding an innovative virtual group to include a team focused on the Japanese market. The Accenture & Cisco Business Group will provide customers with design, configuration and operation services that integrate unified communications and collaboration tools into multiple applications across companies' information technology infrastructures.

The Accenture & Cisco Business Group, announced in February, is a cross-company initiative for the purpose of supporting sales, marketing, customer engagement, and solution development by Accenture and Cisco. The initiative combines Accenture's deep expertise regarding industry issues and business processes with Cisco's expertise in advanced and emerging technologies for collaboration and data center virtualization. The virtual group will target customers in all sectors, ranging from communications, manufacturing, health care, financial services, and resources and energy to government and social infrastructure.

Accenture and Cisco expanded the virtual group to help Japanese companies take advantage of IT as a strategic asset to help them further improve business agility, reduce costs, increase revenue and deliver superior customer service. The Accenture & Cisco Business Group will provide customers with more effective solutions and services through close collaboration between Accenture and Cisco professionals from around the world. The solutions focus on data center, infrastructure and network, unified communications, and collaboration and customer contact transformation.

Says Chikatomo Hodo, the president of Accenture: "Given the recent economic situation, businesses face various issues they have not experienced before, including the need to optimize their IT costs, business efficiency and organization. The Accenture & Cisco Business Group now enables us to offer all-round services to customers through a single point of contact, based on Accenture's expertise and proven record in management and technology consulting, systems integration, and outsourcing, and Cisco's industry-leading IT assets and technologies. This makes it possible for us to provide services with even higher added value, in line with customers' issues and needs."

"The launch of the Accenture & Cisco Business Group is another critical milestone in our strategy to deliver world-class, unique and differentiating business and technology solutions that support our customers in Japan to successfully deliver on their strategy by creating sustainable competitive advantage, significantly improving their productivity and reducing cost. The Accenture & Cisco Business Group brings complete and integrated value-propositions for Unified Communications & Collaboration, Customer Contact Management, Infrastructure and Datacenter Transformation tailored to customers in all industries in Japan by effectively combining the strengths of both Cisco and Accenture into 'turnkey' solutions," said Edzard Overbeek, G.K. President for Cisco.

The following are the Accenture & Cisco Business Group's first four comprehensive solutions:

• Data Center Solutions
  The virtual group will provide consulting services for data center optimization that support ERP platforms and cloud computing. The solutions are based on the Cisco Unified Computing System, an evolutionary data center architecture that unites computing, network, storage access and virtualization resources in a single energy-efficient system that supports backbone applications, such as Oracle EBS and SAP, in large businesses. Accenture and Cisco Unified Computing Solutions cover three main areas: core enterprise applications; data center consolidation; and infrastructure services or cloud computing. 
• Infrastructure and Network Solutions combine the capabilities of Accenture's business-process experts and Cisco networking experts to help companies optimize their network and data center infrastructures to improve the performance of mission-critical applications and reduce risks. The solutions offer a foundation to build productivity-enhancing applications, such as highly secure virtual conferencing and collaboration, as companies evolve to a more virtualized enterprise.
• Unified Communications and Collaboration Solutions include services that are tailored to companies' unique environments to enable new ways of doing business and help create a sustainable competitive advantage. By combining an understanding of the client's business processes, IT architecture and how users actually adopt technology, these solutions help clients collaborate to accelerate decision making and improve operational performance.
• Customer Contact Transformation Solutions help companies win and retain customers with a superior customer service experience that differentiates the organization.  The solutions unite expertise in customer relationship management, analytics, workflow performance and hiring software applications with intelligent customer-contact collaboration solutions that can help improve agent agility and optimize processes.

For more information on these solutions please contact your Accenture or Cisco representative or go to http://accenture.com/ACBG.

About Accenture

Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company. Combining unparalleled experience, comprehensive capabilities across all industries and business functions, and extensive research on the world's most successful companies, Accenture collaborates with clients to help them become high-performance businesses and governments.  With approximately 177,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries, the company generated net revenues of US$21.58 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2009.  Its home page is www.accenture.com.