Industry giants Apple and Cisco announced a partnership Monday to optimize iOS devices and Cisco networks for seamless interoperability, Apple said in a press release on its website.
Aimed at those in the workplace, the collaboration will provide businesses with improved collaboration tools through “experiences specially optimized for iOS across mobile, cloud, and premises-based collaboration tools such as Cisco Spark, Cisco Telepresence and Cisco WebEx,” the release said.
According to the release, the effort will focus on bringing the Cisco environment to Apple’s iPhone and iPad devices.
“iPhone and iPad have become essential tools for the modern workforce and are changing the way work gets done,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said in Monday’s release. “Together with Cisco, we believe we can give businesses the tools to maximize the potential of iOS and help employees become even more productive using the devices they already love.”
“Ninety-five percent of companies in the Fortune 500 count on Cisco Collaboration and Cisco networks,” Cisco executive chairman John Chambers added. “Through this engineering and go-to-market partnership, we’re offering our joint customers the ability to seamlessly extend that awesome Cisco environment to their favorite iOS devices.”
The move comes as part of Apple’s continued quest to expand into the business space and follows a similar agreement between Apple and IBM last year. As part of that agreement, the two tech giants agreed to collaborate on user-friendly business apps drawn from IBM’s strengths in security, device management and big-data analytics and Apple’s expertise in consumer experience, hardware and software integration and developer platform.
The first wave of apps from the collaboration was released in December 2014 and included solutions for banking, retail, insurance, financial services, telecommunications businesses as well as governments and airlines.
Filed Under: Devices
