NEW YORK and SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Deloitte and Cisco (NasdaqGS:CSCO - News) today announced a collaborative initiative that combines the intelligence in Cisco's network platform with Deloitte's broad array of business process and technology consulting capabilities. Deloitte and Cisco have entered into a go-to-market agreement focused on developing service offerings that take advantage of the intelligence of the network to enhance business processes. The Deloitte and Cisco collaboration will map business processes to network intelligent services, such as communication and collaboration, user identification, and wireless location detection, so businesses can achieve more visibility, control, and responsiveness across the enterprise while leveraging their existing business applications.

The go-to-market agreement between Cisco and Deloitte includes collaboration on service development, education, training, sales and delivery. Deloitte and Cisco will initially focus their efforts on the development and delivery of services aimed at risk, compliance and performance management challenges.

"Rapid response capability has increased dramatically with the heightened emphasis on risk management and the value of real-time information," said Lee Dittmar, a principal with Deloitte Consulting LLP "The speed and consequence of adverse events require capabilities that can be delivered only when network services in the enterprise architecture are fully utilized. We agree with Cisco that the network can be the backbone for IT communications, and an important element in enabling better risk, compliance and performance management."

Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO)