Tech Data, Cisco Partner For Simplicity

Tech Data has announced two Cisco-based products aimed at simplifying the digital demands of customers in the health care vertical as well as those customers who have several branch locations within their business.

Branch Interconnect and Clinic Interconnect, are separate cloud-managed digital transformation solutions that deliver simplicity at scale through a single-provider, single-interface, single-invoice managed service for branch industries, Tech Data said in a press release.

“Digital is driving how business is done, and we are continuing to create innovative solutions that fully support our customers as they navigate that sea change,” said Phillip Privett, vice president, Cisco Solutions, at Tech Data. “These solutions allow our customers to successfully and efficiently transform how business is done by delivering better means of collaboration among distributed organizations.”

The announcement was made as Tech Data kicks off Tech Connect this week in San Antonio, Texas.

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Branch Interconnect and Clinic Interconnect bring Cisco collaboration, networking and security technologies together to create what Tech Data said is a better customer experience, improvements in operational efficiencies and workforce innovation for branch-oriented industries such as retail, financial services, hospitality, manufacturing and healthcare — areas where collaboration across branches can be mission critical, the company said.

Both solutions enable customers to monitor, troubleshoot and support systems via a single dashboard.

Tom Joyce, Director, director of healthcare sales, with Meridian IT Inc. an integrator based north of Chicago, said Clinic Interconnect solves the problem of how hospitals share data after they combine forces, or purchase smaller doctors offices, to expand their reach in the community.

“What Tech Data is doing is they’re combining their strengths with Cisco, and Accreon to be able to interconnect all of those branches so that they can easily exchange data and communicate throughout their organizations,” he said. “We will be able to promote it to our customers, both existing customers and new customers. It will be great for us. It will expand our reach into the health care market and more importantly it will help the hospitals and the industry be more efficient in their communication between branches and hospitals.”

Branch Interconnect features a Web-based dashboard with single sign-on for monitoring, troubleshooting, alerting and ticketing through a single pane of glass, along with single-source billing, service and support across the solution stack via Tech Data Managed Services, the company said.

For working together among branches, the product features Omnichannel, highly secure unified collaboration and digital whiteboarding using Cisco Webex Teams and Cisco Webex Board.

In addition to the features already mentioned, Clinic Interconnected can integrate clinical, claims and device data from disparate healthcare systems by using Accreon Cloud Exchange Service, Tech Data said.

“These new offerings provide our customers the opportunity to accelerate onboarding, lower operational costs and simplify management of their branch infrastructure," Kristen Wright, senior director of engineering at Cisco, said in a statement. "Security and customer experience are critical, so we've built into the offering Cisco's best-in-class security, guest Wi-Fi and team collaboration assets, which lay the groundwork for a state-of-the-art digital experience for branch locations. We are excited to partner with Tech Data to bring these offerings to market."