Two of the biggest and most well-known names in technology are Cisco Systems Inc. (NASDAQ: CSCO) and Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL). They are not known as competitors by and large, but there is some overlap. Now Apple wants to get its products and operating system more widely used in business, and a new partnership between these two companies will drive faster toward that goal.

A post from Cisco’s official corporate blog from new CEO Chuck Robbins shows that Apple and Cisco will be working together. The two companies will collaborate to optimize Cisco networks for iOS devices and apps.

A move will be made to integrate iPhones with Cisco environments, as well as to provide “unique collaboration capabilities on iPhones and iPads.”

Cisco and Apple will have a joint engineering effort. The efforts will be focused on Cisco networks and iOS devices and extending Cisco’s Unified Communications experience to the iPhone. Another effort will be made to collaborate with the iOS experiences on Cisco Spark, Cisco TelePresence and Cisco WebEx.

Apple CEO Tim Cook said:

iOS is the world’s best mobile platform, and nearly every Fortune 500 and Global 500 company today has put iOS at the center of their mobile strategy. iPhone and iPad have become essential tools for the modern workforce and are changing the way work gets done. Together with Cisco, we believe we can give businesses the tools to maximize the potential of iOS and help employees become even more productive using the devices they already love.

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Cisco Executive Chairman John Chambers said:

Ninety-five percent of companies in the Fortune 500 count on Cisco Collaboration and Cisco networks to help their teams be more productive. Through this engineering and go-to-market partnership, we’re offering our joint customers the ability to seamlessly extend that awesome Cisco environment to their favorite iOS devices. Together, we’re going to help teams achieve higher levels of productivity and effectiveness.

Chuck Robbins, the new CEO of Cisco, said via his blog post:

Together, we will enable mobile apps and experiences that deliver the quality and experience we need while meeting enterprise requirements for management and security… Our two companies share a common passion to create a vastly improved mobile work experience. We also recognize the enormous opportunity we have to bring together the leading mobile platform and the leading provider of secure networks and collaboration to make the mobile work experience what it should be. What makes this new partnership unique is that our engineering teams are innovating together to build joint solutions that our sales teams and partners will take jointly to our customers.

While neither company is likely to see any immediate boost to revenues, this is far from bad news for those who want to see a wider integration of technology to be more Mac and iOS friendly.

Apple shares were last seen down 16 cents at $113.13 and Cisco shares were last seen down seven cents at $25.93.

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