IBM, Cisco Offer Crisis Services

WASHINGTON -- IBM (NYSE:IBM - News), a global leader in business continuity and resiliency services and Cisco, a global leader in networking, today announced they will partner to provide emergency crisis response capabilities for the first time as an end-to-end managed service. The new IBM Crisis Management Services for Crisis Response service combines advanced communications, collaboration and coordination technologies, satellite and wireless capabilities and broad experience from both companies to help businesses, governments and first responder organizations prepare, respond and rapidly recover from disruptive events and challenging environments.

The introduction of a managed service for crisis response marks a turning point in the growing area of Business Continuity and Resiliency Services, where vendors focus on helping clients maintain continuous access to their enterprise information and critical business processes during emergency situations. Traditionally, an organization is forced to choose from an array of product-based point solutions for crisis response, only to be challenged by the need to integrate disparate components. The IBM and Cisco solution packages hardware, software, services and satellite-based capabilities as one service, offering clients a one-stop emergency response communications network. The solution is designed to integrate into a client's daily operational fabric to act as a network communications and information hub during times of disruption.

The new Crisis Management Services for Crisis Response from IBM and Cisco offers open, modular, wireless and standards-based commercial platforms that address key aspects of a catastrophic or disruptive event, while preserving the integrity and security of infrastructure. Specifically, it is designed to provide:

- Continuity of operations

- Network operability and recovery

- Internet Protocol (IP) based interoperable communications

- Secure cross-organization and domain information sharing capabilities

- Incident management and decision support tools
- Tactical operations, command and control platforms

- Adaptive infrastructure based on leading middleware

IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM)

Cisco Systems Inc.