NICE, Cisco Integration to Impact Workforce Optimization Industry

In an announcement that is sure to rock the workforce optimization and customer relationship management sector today, NICE Systems (News - Alert), a provider of customer experience enhancing solutions for the enterprise announced a new integration with Cisco that will allow both companies to reap grand benefits in terms of broadening customer bases and strengthening product offerings.

As a long-standing Preferred Solutions Developer for Cisco (News - Alert), NICE will be offering its SmartCenter business solutions and solutions from its suite of workforce optimization products as part of Cisco’s SolutionsPlus progam.

I got to speak with Vickie McGovern, director of NICE’s Alliance with Cisco, to gain more insight into what exactly this bolstering of the two companies’ partnership means for them moving forward. She noted that NICE and Cisco are taking their relationship to the next level with this latest development. In concrete terms, that means that Cisco is now going to be able to “globally resell NICE solutions. That’s about 1,200 advanced unified communications partners for Cisco, and about 300 advanced technology partners… It enables Cisco to now go to market with a truly complete solution for their end-user customers.”

Kind of a big deal, right? It’s no news that NICE and Cisco have been working together on various projects and partnerships – they have been since 2000 – but a relationship of this magnitude means covering a much larger breadth of customers for both companies.

Cisco has not been as strong in the area of applications that allows users to understand the customer experience. Cisco does a lot in the routing and reporting area, and even launched a bunch of social media-related news last year, but this agreement with NICE boosts Cisco’s ability to provide better visibility into the customer experience overall.

More specifically, “This agreement enabled the NICE application to sit on top of Cisco’s MediaSense, which is Cisco’s new capture platform, by which NICE’s recording application has the ability to tag (News - Alert), playback and selectively retain those recordings; the ability to apply quality management metrics and measures; and the ability of supervisors to drill down and see what’s going on within their contact center environments, etc.” McGovern told me.

Udi Ziv (News - Alert), president of the NICE Enterprise Group said in a press release, “We are excited about taking this important relationship with Cisco to the next level. Having been selected as a leading provider of such strategic contact center business solutions and workforce optimization products is a testament to the unique value-add of the NICE offerings for increasing revenues, enhancing customer experience, improving regulatory compliance, and optimizing contact center operations.  Our selection into the SolutionsPlus program will allow our customers to purchase a complete suite of contact center business solutions while maintaining a best-of-breed strategy, and will further increases NICE’s reach in the field.”

NICE is planning on holding court in Cisco’s booth next week at the Enterprise Connect (News - Alert) show in Orlando, FL, debuting its solutions and discussing this new partnership and what it means for the rest of the industry.