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Tech giant inks partnership with Cisco

The deal was announced by Cisco at its huge conference for its 20,000-plus salespeople in Las Vegas this week, and Apple CEO Tim Cook made a surprise appearance.

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Cisco's new CEO Chuck Robbins is starting his reign with a big partnership: Cisco has struck a surprise deal with Apple to make iOS devices — iPhones and iPads — work better on Cisco gear-powered networks.

The deal was announced by Cisco at its huge conference for its 20,000-plus salespeople in Las Vegas this week, and Apple CEO Tim Cook made a surprise appearance.

According to the Cisco press release, the company "create a fast lane for iOS business users by optimizing Cisco networks for iOS devices and apps, integrating iPhone with Cisco enterprise environments and providing unique collaboration on iPhone and iPad."

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Cisco is as big as it gets in the computer network world, both in supplying gear for the internet and to private networks that companies build for their own employees. It's networking gear is used by 95% of the companies in the Fortune 500. And nearly all of those companies have employees using iPhones and iPads.

The agreement is in three parts. The two companies plan to make it easier for iOS devices to connect to the network and for their apps to work flawlessly. And Cisco will tie its collaboration tools more tightly with iOS devices.

For example, the partnership will let iPhones work better with Cisco desk phones and telepresence equipment (for video conferencing), and Cisco tools like Spark (group conferencing/chat) and WebEx (online meetings).

This will be the second huge partnership has entered to help it sell more iOS devices (particularly iPads) to the business world. Last year it teamed up with IBM to help develop apps for the iPad, and that deal is going strong. Now Cisco can be added to that very exclusive list.

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