Cisco Case Study

Information age is characterized by the functioning of a business in a systematic automated platform with an under control and under surveillance internal environment and the outside markets too. Moreover, the platform enables business to deal with its own people, partners, customers and suppliers through a network that facilitates ease of operations. Cisco adopted one such highly scalable platform to manage and process all its business information, the platform was set up by Oracle, which rolled out its ERP product for Cisco to achieve its business objectives.

Cisco’s IP based open-standards IT architecture was completely standardized with latest versions of Operating system, Servers, DBMS, Network Protocol, Email exchange, Browser, and other common productivity application suites deployed worldwide. These standards ensured the reduced time to market, reduced costs and easier data integration. The platform offered so much flexibility, such that it was able to reorganize its R&D and marketing from multiple business units to 3 lines of businesses in fewer than 60 days for a cost less than $1 million.

Cisco leveraged the web to revolutionize its existing business processes through a global intranet for itself and user friendly web applications for customer through internet creating end-to-end capabilities. Self Service applications were provided for both employees and customers, primarily supported by web browsers. Executive Information Systems and Decision Support Systems were used to record and track executive information and enable rational business decisions through interpretation and representation of key historical data such as Bookings, Backlogs, Revenue, Forecast and Plan for all products, channels, customers, geographies and markets. Sales tracking and reporting were also done via internet. E-commerce enabled a convenient channel for customers to perform business transactions in terms of placing & tracking orders and getting the software upgrades...